


The Killing Type

by protagonist_m



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Scotland Yard, Art, Fluff, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, I mean they meet, Liam Payne & Louis Tomlinson Friendship, Loki shows up a lot, M/M, Meet-Cute, Murder Mystery, OT5 Friendship, Promiscuity, Serial Killers, Slow Burn, Smoking, Smut, University, and other stuff, but I hesitate to call it cute, in a...very loose sense, ish, police officers doing their job, the dog not Tom Hiddleston
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-04-29 17:27:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 130,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5136395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protagonist_m/pseuds/protagonist_m
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Liam breathes hotly through his nose, eyes twitching shut as he squeezes a bit more on Zayn’s neck. “Do you know how dangerous what you’re doing is?”</i>
  <br/>
</p>
<p>
<i>Zayn draws in his own ragged breath. “Do you?”</i><br/>
</p><hr/>
<p>
Zayn is a doctoral student who goes to great lengths to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Liam is heading the biggest serial murder investigation London has seen in half a century. And before this, he'd never been sent a love note via corpse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, party people. Here's the deal:  
> 
> 
> **I'm not going to warn you about plot points.** I'm sorry. This story has violence, gruesome descriptions, some generally unhappy topics, and a lil' bit of death. If you can think of any reason that might be upsetting or triggering to you, please please take care of yourself and just avoid this whole thing. I don't want to ruin anyone's day, but I also don't want to spoil something that hinges so much on suspense. Hopefully that's understandable.  
> 
> 
> Anyway! One million gold coins to my beautiful beta Monica for her constant enthusiasm, support, idea generating, aesthetic building, playlist constructing, secret keeping, and total perfection. Thank you for listening that night I said "well, I had this idea..." Thank you for everything after.  
> 
> 
> Hope you all enjoy. Find me on tumblr at protagonist-m.

When they finally find her, victim number eight has been there for a while.

Her skin is marbled with burst blood vessels, flesh laden with sunken blisters that show sickly green under the fluorescent lights. There’s a bulge to her eyes, makeup painting her vaguely orange against her body’s insistent decay. The immaculate lacquer on her nails shines a violent red. It doesn’t do a lot to offset the puffiness of her extremities. Rigor has taken its turn and leaves her limp, a puddle of meat and bone more than anything.

Liam notices these things the way others, he suspects, notice the weather. Passive, unimportant. Side notes.

Really, it’s the abdomen that draws focus.

She’s like the others: flesh of her torso neatly parted, folded back and held in place with glasshead pins buried in tidy lines along her sides. Ribs cracked and pushed open to reveal the putrefying organs in her chest cavity.

One of them is missing.

Nelson swoops close to where Liam kneels. She presses out dry little clicks from the camera, focus on the mottling organs. It’s like some nightmarish butcher’s display, Liam thinks, spare and orderly, emphasizing the shape and robust weight of choice cuts carved from flesh.

“Guess they didn’t figure for the long weekend,” Nelson says, breathing through her mouth.

Maybe there’s a response to that, some snappy retort, dry and a tad dark. Liam doesn’t really do those, too locked into his own observational headspace. Sight and smell and even touch, if it’s called for. Not so much quippy one-liners.

They have a guy for that sort of thing.

“Weren’t penciling in a lot of barbecue invites, were they,” Tomlinson remarks. He crouches down on the opposite side of the body, nimble fingers covered in blue latex and hovering over exposed organs. The sleeves of his button-down are cuffed so his tan forearms are left bare. “Jes, you good?”

“One minute...” Nelson hums. A few more rapid clicks of the extended lens, this time focused on the victim’s hands. She stands smoothly, camera bouncing against her sternum when she releases it. “Need air that doesn’t reek. Back in a sec.”

“Righto,” Tomlinson mutters, setting to work. He pulls out the pins holding the victim’s bisected flesh one by one, dropping them into a baggie he’s already taken the time to properly label.

Liam leaves him to it, begins examining the wider area around the victim for hair or tissue or a fiber from a cloth. Anything. “They might be penciling in barbecues,” he notes.  ”Could be a proper footie dad.”

“Could be a proper footie  _mum,_ ” Tomlinson adds, thin lips quirking into a grim smile. He finishes with the pins. “Eighteen total,” he murmurs into his shoulder. Presumably, the iPhone he’s secured to an arm mount catches it.

Liam hears their team buzzing around them, sharp eyes critical on every inch of office space. The low-buzzing fluorescents are starting to give him a headache. It’s nothing new.

Nothing about this is new.

“Got her,” Horan calls from the other side of the room. The pair swivel their heads in unison, eyes finding the peroxide-blond when he peeks over the edge of a cubical.

“And?” Tomlinson asks. His eyes remain trained on Horan while his hand finds a pen peeking out of his trouser pocket.  

“Natalie Lightfoot,” Horan recites, reading off of something hidden behind the cubical wall. “Twenty-six last February, apparently.”

Tomlinson relays the information to his iPhone, scribbling down an additional note before beginning on an evidence report for the pins.

He’s lost to his work; Liam tries to follow suit. He spirals out from the body, gaze critical on the hard carpet, the oatmeal-colored cubicles, the worn swivel chairs and tame personal mementos.

Positively mind-numbing.

When he reaches Horan, writing his own evidence reports hunched over a desk—the victim’s—Liam examines the space intensely. 

It's a process that starts with the walls of the cubicle, blanketed with pictures of the woman. Some contain other people. Most do not.

None of them show any signs of holding trace biological evidence.

Still. “Jesy been through?” Liam asks quietly.

Horan grunts an affirmative, still scribbling.

Liam pulls out one of the pins securing a photo. It’s not unlike the ones found on the body, except—ah, there it is. Different width at the head.

“Up for a pint tomorrow?”

Another small noise of assent from Horan, accompanied by a friendly hip-check that Liam sways with gently.

They work in companionable silence for a while. Liam does his best not to look at the eyes of the victim in her many, many photographs.  _Selfies,_ she would’ve called them. Pictures of her in swimsuits. Pictures of her in restaurants and at parks and attending what looks to be an opera. Pictures of her in hats and scarves and sunglasses that obscure nearly her entire face. Pictures of her with women, making peace signs, fingers busy with loud rings. Pictures of her with grinning men, jaws square and hands following the soft curve of her shoulder.

Someone will have to tell them all.

The photos from the cubicle walls go into a baggie labeled clinically with the where and when. Next is the desk itself, devoid of nearly anything but a fairly standard computer and a black pen cup. None of the pens are spangly or have fluffy toppers, which is nice.

Victim number three was wearing hot pink scrubs printed with little cats when they found her.

Nelson is back from her breather before Liam thinks to look for her, working on the quadrant near the toilets with Lucas. Lucas is on loan to homicide for the night and remains twitchy as fuck at the worst of the crime scenes, but Liam watches him put on a brave face whenever he thinks Jesy might be looking, expression slackening and gaze taking on a nonchalant air of boredom that really only works on Tomlinson.

Which is probably where he learned it. Tomlinson himself is preparing the body for transport and covering the extremities in plastic, seemingly unfazed by the swollen, gangrenous feet of the victim less than half a meter from his face.

“Payno,” he calls, eyes slicing blue when they find Liam’s, “D’you have the clippers? Need to undo the—”

“Yeah,” Liam says quickly. He weaves through the cubicle farm, pulling the tiny scissors out of his side pack as he goes.

“Can you just do it, actually?” Tomlinson asks, distracted by the act of securing all the victim’s hair inside the plastic bag wrapping her head. “Need to do the hands next. Those rings are gonna be a nightmare this far along.”

It’s not really an excuse, but Liam crouches down next to the body anyway.

“Niall up for pints tomorrow?” Tomlinson asks. He moves dutifully to the victim’s left hand, careful little tugs on her rings to ease them from the bloated flesh without ripping it from the bone.

“When is Niall not up for a pint?” Liam retorts. He clips the twine wrapping the right hand at the cleanest point he can find, leaving the original knot undisturbed. It loosens enough to pry the object resting in her palm out from under the thin, stained rope.

“Heard that,” Horan calls, “and for the record you’re completely right.”

Liam’s nose wrinkles while he takes in the object in his gloved hand. A quick glance affirms Tomlinson agrees. His expression is nearly feline in its distaste as he reaches to his side sightlessly. His fingers search for a baggie to store the note card he's pulled from the victim’s left hand.

“How do you always get me to bag it?” Liam sighs. “Every time, you get me to bag it.”

With a pitying shake of his head, Tomlinson says, “You’re just easy.” He finally gives up on finding a bag by feel, instead turning and locating one directly behind where he kneels. “Hey, do you wanna read this thing? Or are you saving it for later?”

“They’re usually fresher, at least,” Liam muses, staring down at the heart in his hand. To Tomlinson, “Yeah, guess I should, shouldn't I?” He grabs one of his own bags, sliding the putrid organ inside, trying not to think about it. “It’s been waiting long enough.”

In truth, Liam hates that it's been waiting at all. Another thing to not think about.

Horan strides past and winces a little when he sees the gelatinous contents of the bag Liam’s placing gingerly in the cooler. “Let’s make it the last one, eh?” He cocks his hip against the side of a cubicle as Tomlinson passes Liam the card—thick, cream-white card stock, unblemished by even a fleck of blood.

In delicate font, it reads:  _All my love to Detective Inspector Liam Payne. Thinking of you now and always._

Liam slips it into the evidence bag, fingers cold.

Nothing about this is new.

He begs off for a minute after that. No one seems to mind; Tomlinson is busy coordinating transport of the body to the morgue, most of the scene has been swept, and it’s not like they have something higher priority than “serial murder” brewing at Scotland Yard, anyway.

There’s still a twinge when he pulls a fag from inside his jacket, slipping out the door of the office tower. Liam shakes his head at himself and refuses to feel guilt for needing some sort of stimulant at two in the morning on a Tuesday. Especially after something like the scene upstairs, some intersection of gruesome and mundane.

It’s been nearly a month since the last body. Liam supposes they should have been primed for it. Ready, on any level deeper than procedural.

He wraps his fingers around the lighter in his pocket and remembers the weight of the woman’s heart in his hands. The edges of the note, perfectly crisp like all the others.

Five years into his career in homicide, he knows: it’s impossible to be ready for that sort of thing.

There’s a misting of rain when he steps onto the street, so he shuffles into an alcove near the corner of the building. In another life, it probably housed a phone booth. Now it sits empty and dingy and forgotten with a scattering of cigarette butts that tell Liam he’s not the first person to have this notion. He takes in the quiet of the block, rare in London regardless of hour. The smell of diesel and damp pavement does wonders to clean the smell of decay from his nostrils.

He’s feeling the first good-bad drag of smoke fill his lungs when he hears the voices.

“Don’t fucking lie to me, man—”

“Why would I lie? Why would—”

“I said  _gimme your fucking—_ ”

That’s all he needs. Groaning, he lets the cigarette slip through his fingers and steps into the alley adjacent to the tower. It’s narrow and dark as anything, this time of night, home to some industrial-sized bins and general grime.

It hosts a predictable scene.

“I really wouldn’t,” he says loudly.

The man in the filthy, patch-covered jacket jumps a little, knife twitching in his hand. The boy pinned to the side of the office tower scowls a little deeper in response. Which, really, strikes Liam as an oddly understated reaction to the situation. 

“Ain’t no concern of yours,” snaps the mugger. Now that Liam’s really looking, he seems twitchy in general. On something.

“’S definitely a concern of his, mate,” says the boy pinned to the wall. His eyebrows raise like he’s letting the tweaker in on a secret. He indicates in Liam’s general direction with a minute twitch of his head, careful of the blade pressed to his skin. “Check it out.”

The tweaker turns, knife falling to his side when he takes in Liam’s solid stance and shiny badge, winking in the streetlight where it's pinned to his jacket. 

“Shit,” the tweaker spits. His worn boots are moving underneath him before he’s decided which direction to run. Addled indecision costs him; he trips, spilling onto the ground and allowing the knife to clatter out of his grip.

“Yeah,” Liam says sympathetically as he strides over, “shit.”

It’s the space of five minutes to get Lucas down from the crime scene and into a squad car, tweaker cuffed in the back while Liam and the would-be victim watch on.

“That’s so  _lucky,_ ” Lucas enthuses to the criminal, climbing into the drivers’ side. “ _And_ there was a warrant out? You’re so, I mean, you’re just  _shitting_ horseshoes, at this point.”

“Stan, don’t antagonize the—never mind, then,” Liam says, watching Lucas’ door slam even as the engine is kicking to life, car off toward the station in moments. He sighs, rolling his shoulders, then pulls another fag from his inner pocket. “Alright,” he mutters, lighting up while he turns to where he instructed the victim to await a brief questioning on the incident, “why don’t we start with a n—are you okay?”

“Uh,” the boy grates out, wiping at his cheeks hastily with hands that quake, “yeah, I’m just. Fuck,” he breathes, exhale trembling like the beat of a sparrow’s wings. “Sorry, I’m—”

“You’re alright,” Liam says quickly. This isn't generally his beat, street crime. Most victims are dead when he meets them. When it becomes apparent the kid isn’t getting his breathing under control, Liam slowly brings a hand up to rest on the boy’s arm. His thumb presses faintly into the material of the boy’s jacket—leather, well-maintained, he notes absently—to offer a grounding point. “He’s getting booked, so—”

“Yeah,” the kid cuts him off with that thick accent, very clearly embarrassed. He leans into the touch, though, even as he presses his fingers over his eyes. “Fuck. One sec.”

Liam shakes his head. “It’s alright. That’s not—sorry, I forget that sort of thing isn’t everyday for most people.”

The kid is taking these long, low breaths, bringing himself under control. “Sounds a bit shit, that as your everyday,” he observes, wobbly tone playing at conversational. He still hasn’t uncovered his eyes.

His words startle a short laugh out of Liam. “There’s…there’s things that might be described as shit, yeah,” he admits. He thinks of the latest victim’s heart, decaying in his palm meters from the space where she’d breathed and worked and surrounded herself with snapshots of happy moments. “That guy wouldn’t make the list, though, actually.”

Finally, the boy’s stabilized himself to a point of marginal dignity, hands dropping from his face. His eyes are a dark amber under the streetlight, lashes casting heavy curtains of shadow over the defined angles of his cheekbones, his narrow jaw.

“One sec,” he repeats, dragging in a final harsh breath though his nose.

Liam looks him over. Takes in the insistent tremble of his frame. He remembers this—being young enough that cutting through back alleys on the way home seemed smart, arrogant enough that nothing felt more humiliating than an admission of humanity. He takes in the defiant pout of the boy’s lips, the stubborn set of his brows.

“Take your time,” he gently tells him.

Biting at his lip, the kid shrugs. Looks away. “That’s a nasty habit,” he mutters off-handedly, indicating where Liam’s cigarette hangs limp between his fingers. “The carcinogens in that aren’t fit for a landfill.”

As if Liam’s never seen a distraction tactic. “I’ll make this quick so you can get home, yeah?” Liam starts, flicking a bit of ash onto the dirty pavement.

With a sigh, the boy starts talking. “Zayn Malik, birthday’s January 12th—age twenty, so you can do the math on that—heading home and wasn’t thinking, I guess—”

“You’ve done this before,” Liam observes.

A cab passes and its light slides over Zayn’s face, throwing one half into shadow for an instant. “I like crime procedurals,” he says flatly.

He doesn’t look familiar anyway, not like the kids who make the station their hapless second home. “Alright, Zayn Malik,” Liam replies, easy notes scribbled into his notepad with the cigarette tucked between his lips. He takes down other basics, mobile number and any prior relationship with the mugger—nonexistent, unsurprisingly. Then, “Said you were heading home, where is that?”

Zayn tells him.

A minute later, Liam is on the phone with Tomlinson, still upstairs at the crime scene.

“You can’t just abandon the scene,” Tomlinson hisses over the line.

“What’s left to close out?” Liam asks. “Actually curious, here.”

“There’s—that’s not—if I’m stuck here at arsecrack o’clock, so’re you,” Tomlinson insists. “Liam, come  _on._ ”

“Mmm, I’m case lead, though,” Liam says apologetically. “Don’t have to do what the mouthy pathologist tells me.”

There’s a series of faint squeaking noises, Tomlinson indignant and struggling to find the breath and language to make Liam bend to his will. “But I’m  _your_ mouthy pathologist,” is what he decides on.

Liam exhales a laugh. “You’re no one’s pathologist.”

“Well now I’m definitely not your pathologist,” Tomlinson grumbles.

The scuffing sound of leather scraping against concrete has Liam turning to look over his shoulder at Zayn as he slides down the wall to fold up neatly on the ground. His forehead is resting on his knees. They look bony where they peek out from his shredded black jeans. His narrow back heaves with deep breaths, like he’s trying to calm himself again.

Liam turns away. “The kid’s really messed up over it,” he murmurs into the receiver. “Look, the tube’s closed, it’s an hour’s walk, I can’t—”

“We have to get all this evidence down to the station—”

“ _Louis,_ ” Liam interrupts. “Winston’s not even awake.” Quieter, with another glance at the boy still curled up on the ground, “The body’s been moved, yeah?”

Tomlinson sighs, crisp and defeated through the tiny speaker. “Yeah, it…made it back.”

“And the rest is nonperishable,” Liam verifies.

“Yeah,” Tomlinson admits.

“And Nelson’s back at the station already.”

“Yes.”

“And  _Lucas_ is back at the station already.”

“I get it,” snaps Louis. Then, “Sorry, just—don’t keep me waiting, alright? I haven’t slept more than two consecutive hours this week. Month, maybe.”

Liam nods pointlessly. “I’ll beat you back.”

“No you won’t,” Tomlinson says, disgruntled expression nearly visible before Liam’s eyes, and the line goes dead.

When Liam nudges at Zayn’s boot with one of his own, the kid looks up. He still has that frightened rabbit air about him, Liam notes, but he doesn’t look as though he’s about to be ill or anything as he raises an eyebrow in query.

“Taking you home,” Liam informs him. “C’mon, then.”

Zayn wobbles to his feet, silent. He places spindly fingers on the wall as he moves his combat boots to support him; Liam resists the thrumming, sudden urge to place a hand at the small of his back to assist.

“Y’know,” Zayn says, shuffling behind him to the vehicle, “generally when guys take me home, their approach has a little more finesse.”

Liam’s hand falters on his keys. “You’re throwing around words like  _finesse_ at two in the morning,” he says, pulling on the door handle.

Zayn might snort as he climbs into the car. Liam isn’t paying him any attention. Decidedly.

The drive is twenty minutes and silent for nearly all of them.

“You at the uni, then?” Liam can’t help but ask.

He sees Zayn, slumped slightly against the door, peer over at him. His hair is cropped on the sides and messy at the crown, inky black in the light that filters from the shops they glide past. “Yeah.” The word is heavy with fatigue. Probably on the back end of an adrenal spike from fear.

Liam nods. “And what are you studying,” he asks in wry almost-singsong, determined to keep the boy awake through the drive. He changes lanes, controlled.

“Neuroscience. Biology.”

Damn. “Ambitious.” He chances a quick glance at the kid. “You think you want to push for advanced study in one of those, or—?”

“I’m in the doctoral program,” Zayn says wearily.

_Damn._ ”That’s…” Liam shifts in his seat, tongue tracing the backs of his teeth. “Your parents must love that.”

Zayn doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

By the time they pull in front of the flat Zayn specifies, he’s blinking his large eyes like a drowsing owl, exhaustion slackening his features.

And he was going to  _walk_  back here. “You alright getting in?” Liam asks. He notices Zayn’s seatbelt, already undone. The detective casts back, trying to remember if the boy had fastened it at all.

“Yes, officer, thank you, officer,” Zayn says, but the sarcastic simper is too rumpled by sleepiness to hold any real sting. He unlocks his door, swaying unsteadily on his feet when he exits. Shrugs his jacket up toward his ears, burrowing in while he walks around to the sidewalk.

Liam feels his lips pulling up at the corners. Exhaustion is taking its toll on him as well, it seems. He leans out his window to address Zayn on the pavement. “Please don’t wander through alleys late at night anymore.”

“Yes sir,” Zayn says dully, swaying where he stands.

“Please don’t wander through alleys at all, actually.”

“Yes sir,” he repeats, eyes verging on glassy.

“You’re knackered,” Liam says quietly. “Alright, get some rest. Off with you.”

Zayn mumbles something that might be another _yes sir_ , body moving with the same tired slur as his speech toward the entrance of the building. It’s set back on a green that shows painfully bright under the well-maintained lighting.

Liam waits until he sees the front door close to move the car out of park.

 

There’s this thing called the _Baader Meinhof Complex._ Liam could swear he still has notes on it from some college class tucked in with other adolescent detritus at his parents’ house. It’s the phenomenon of noticing something more when it’s first realized as a reality by the mind. Patterns pulled from thin air, eyes slightly more open.

Not knowledge Liam is asked to call upon with any real frequency, but he’s been thinking of it lately. Of why the brain is the world’s most reluctant spectator, considering only what it’s forced to acknowledge. Believing to see.

There’s a lot he would do to _see,_ right now.

“Again,” he requests, flat and grudging. He twirls his pen in his fingers.

Kloss opens her mouth to protest. Ends up only exhaling in disbelief. Her legs dig a bit more into the table’s edge where she hovers over it, staring down at them all. “We've covered  _everything._ _”_

“And now I need you to cover everything  _again,_ ” Liam tells her, maybe a bit impatiently. In response to the unimpressed set of her face, “We're missing something, alright? This is how we’re going to deal with it.”

Kloss' eyes flash with irritation, tan jaw set like she wants to argue the point against her superior. She'd moved to England in her teens but never quite lost the senseless contrariness Liam's come to associate with Americans. An officer had once jokingly referred to her as a Yankee import.

Only the once, though.

“Eight victims as of early Tuesday morning,” she begins, teeth clenching. “First body found December 19th. Victims range from twenty-one to thirty-five years of age, both male and female.” Everyone around the table remains quiet—the only way to take in this sort of information, even when it’s old—as she continues. “All found with their chest cavities bisected, held open with the same brand of pins. All found with ribs cracked to reveal organs. All found with a rather, uh, _ardent_ note card secured in their left hand naming Detective Inspector Payne—that's you, by the way,” she inclines her head to Liam slightly. “All found with their heart removed and secured in their right hand by crafting twine.”

Kloss' posture is straight where she stands and speaks. Militant. Liam spares a nanosecond to be distantly amused by the contrast between her and Detective Sergeant Cabello. The younger woman sits directly to Kloss’ left, slumped in a chair with her pen doodling lazy, meandering spirals as she listens to the grudging recap.

“Due to bruises on the arms and lower legs of the victims consistent with those caused by prolonged restraint, it appears our killer ties them up before making the initial incision to the chest,” Kloss rattles off. “Given the state of the crime scenes—always the last place each victim was seen alive—we can surmise that the killer doesn’t do their work on-location, but rather transports the bodies afterward. The direction of the incisions seems to suggest our killer is right-handed.”

Tomlinson is tapping his fingers gently on his wrist, eyes glazed like he's keeping careful time to a melody in his brain. Delevingne went for a bathroom break fifteen minutes ago. 

“The first cut made is a lateral incision with a thin blade, likely a scalpel,” Kloss recites, “after which point the victims quickly bleed out, are cleaned off, and then bisected.”

Horan appears to be writing something down, at least.

Liam leans toward him. 

Ah. Just a grocery list, then.

“End of summation,” Kloss finishes, words rolling out like slow wheels on gravel.

Liam casts about the long table. “Any thoughts?” he asks as Kloss sits.

“Seeing as it's the same stuff we've been working with this whole time? No,” says Cabello. Her notebook page is nearly covered in spirals now.

Tomlinson groans quietly, rubbing at his face. “We're sure there's no shared background between the victims?” he asks. It might be the hundredth time.

It feels like the hundredth time.

“No common age, sex, race, ethnicity, orientation,” Delevingne says, striding back from the toilets to flop into a chair. Like Kloss, she tends to extend her legs out under the table. Liam moves his feet to accommodate her stretch. “No common hobby. No common—favorite color, fuck.” A dull bang when her forehead hits the table. “Just  _nothing._ _”_

Liam nods, dutiful. He knows all of this. They all do; he still can't afford any of his team missing details. Scarce as they are, this far out.

“Tommo,” he says, “any word from the morgue? Anything weird? Or, like,” he blinks to clear his swimming vision under the cheap light fixtures, “new? At all?”

“Not last I checked,” Tomlinson admits. He trades in tapping fingers for a bouncing leg. “They wanted to run some tests on the crawlies we found in the latest vic's chest, though, should be wrapping it up pretty shortly here.”

Cabello's frown deepens, pen digging that much harder into her paper as she scribbles random shapes. If he had to guess, Liam would say it helps her think. “Trying to nail down a location for the actual murder?” she asks.

“Among other things.”

Liam looks at his team, tired and beat down with no new information to sustain momentum. If they were other people, they’d be heading home right now.

The beep of the coffee maker topping off a fresh pot cuts through the contemplative silence. There are handfuls of harrowing crime scene photos and reports scattered down the middle of the table, a reminder of how very unlike other people they are.

It’s paltry material for an investigation of this size. For how richly the murders have sparked the imagination of the usual sensationalist rags, there’s a devastating lack of actual evidence to lead the team. Clues the Met’s brightest can’t seem to find, missteps their killer hasn’t made yet.

They’re six of the smartest people in this building, and they’re at a stalemate with a murderer.

It’s not something they’re publicizing, not something Chief Inspector Winston has shared with the voracious journalists who crowd their press room—for all he lacks the stomach to be involved in the actual investigation, let it never be said their supervisor doesn’t have a shrewd sense of image—but it’s the truth.

Liam casts a look around the office the investigative team has commandeered to serve as their base of operations. Ramshackle setup for food in the corner, dusty old couches by the windows, a shelf of books that have collected here through an unconscious group effort over the last seven months. High ceilings that don’t hold nearly enough light with a central air system rattling on above them.

The detective is starting to know this space better than the walls of his own flat. He tries not to think about it. Tries not to dwell on how he brings Loki here on especially grueling days so the puppy isn’t left waiting for someone who stumbles through the door far too late with an aching body and spent mind and no ability left to show anything approaching affection.

The detective lines the edges of a photo stack up. His mind scans for ways to make tonight’s work productive, prove he earned his place leading this investigation in Winston’s stead.

Ultimately, the solution proves brilliant in its simplicity.

“Everyone go home,” he decides. A chair scrapes against the tile when Cabello jolts in her seat from the noise cutting through the exhausted stillness. Liam receives a few glances verifying that he isn’t joking. “I mean it, go be…not here.” A little exhale, not quite a sigh, falls from his lips as he rubs at his jaw. Sore. He must have been clenching it again. “Just be ready to look at this again in the morning.”

The shuffling to stand is cautious, like Liam might change his mind. He doesn’t. Leads by example instead, grabs his keys from his desk as he strides to the door. There’s a pause while he waits for Tomlinson to retrieve his own scattered possessions and tuck them into the restrictively tight pockets of his jeans.

“Payno,” Tomlinson offers, nudging Liam’s shoulder with his own to get him to start moving.

“Loulou,” Liam simpers for the glare it elicits.

They split off from the rest of the team, shouting a few goodbyes and jostling each other as they meander toward the bank of lifts that lead to the front of the building.

The street welcomes them with summer noise and summer heat, falling sun layered with city smells. Liam breathes deep, tries to hold onto a part of the day he so rarely gets to experience.

He breaks the easy silence to ask, “Yours or mine or the pub?” They shuffle off to the side for a gaggle of teenagers to pass in a cloud of mingling perfumes and colognes—endearingly revolting, Liam thinks, quirking a smile at the one lad who bothers to say _excuse us._

“You know, usually I’d say the pub,” Louis muses, louder and a little more Yorkshire now that they’re not in the insular atmosphere of the office, “but I think that’s where the Sergeants were headed.”

Liam understands. “Let’s go to mine, yeah? Get that fried chicken from that place and play video games. Or something.”

“God, yes, please.” Louis kicks at a loose shard of the pavement, watches the cement skitter away from the toe of his trainer. “First one to bring up the investigation loses.”

They’re already in Liam’s car when the detective finally thinks to ask, “Loses what, though?”

“Their _life,_ ” Louis mutters darkly, glaring into the passenger side mirror.

And it’s easy, this, familiar and constant like so few things can be. Loki reacts to Louis’ appearance the way he reacts to everything, excited circles around their feet, tongue lolling from his panting mouth.

“Baby’s gotten big,” Louis coos, scooping the puppy up. “Gonna be a right menace for your dad soon, little love?”

Liam drops his bag by the couch, shuffling into the kitchen to seek out the delivery menu he wants. “You wanna take him for a walk?”

“Wanna kiss his little eyebrows,” Louis offers nonsensically, voice still babyish. He drifts into the kitchen doorway, indeed kissing the little beast’s fluffy white eyebrows where he’s cradled to his chest.

Everyone is obsessed with the puppy. Liam doesn’t blame them, fell in love instantly with Loki when the Klee Kai belonging to the girl down the hall had a litter. Still, there’s a sting to the way the people in his life seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief when he announced the pup’s arrival. _That_ _’s Liam squared away then,_ they said without saying.

Which, he’d argue the point—he’s been a little fucking busy to be dating, alright, he’s barely got time to breathe, let alone crave companionship—but hours after Louis has left that night he wakes up in a cold sweat. Before he’s even registered that he’s awake, he’s wiping at his temple, the dampness there. His eyes strain to check, make sure his fingers haven’t come back red.

In these half-real moment, it seems a very valid possibility.

And, Liam admits, it’s nice to be able to place a hand on the dog’s chest, feel his little body move up and down as he dozes. Signs of life, uninterrupted by violence and morbid deconstruction.

Loki breathes; Liam breathes with him. Counts exhales until the sky turns blue and his eyes grow too dry and heavy to hold open.

 

There’s a phantom at the end of the bar. He’s in rather rough shape.

“What the hell happened?” Liam demands. He’d insisted on grabbing the next round of pints when Tomlinson bet him he couldn’t carry all the glasses back to their table. Which was categorically dumb—their group isn't even large, just the half dozen unlucky sods Winston’s appointed as the serial murder investigation’s core team.

Zayn looks up slowly from the bar, indifference radiating like black light.

“Oh.” And in a blink, the boy’s gaze becomes warm, fully engaged when it meets Liam’s. “It’s you.”

“It’s me,” Liam agrees, off-kilter. He crosses his arms. “What are you doing here?”

The kid smiles, blinding white against the bruise on his cheek. “What do people generally do at pubs?”

“What are you doing  _here,_ _”_ Liam specifies. His whole life is observation, for chrissake. He'd have taken note of Zayn's slender build and dark energy and apparently omnipresent leather jacket in the pub down the street from the Yard. “And what  _happened._ _”_

With a shrug, Zayn says, “Bit of an altercation with a…” he licks out over his busted lip, partially bruised with flecks of blood still clinging to it, “….larger fellow.”

“Altercation,” Liam repeats dumbly. There’s stains like rust on a few of Zayn’s tapered fingers. “Larger fellow.” 

Zayn lifts a short glass of something the same honey as his eyes up to his ruined mouth. “Breadth and scope of it,” he murmurs, swallowing down an aggressive mouthful and making himself shudder.

“Were you—are you going to report it?” Liam fumbles. He's admittedly at a bit of a loss, standing at the bar with six draughts growing slippery with condensation by his hand and a boy carrying traces of gravel in his hair in front of him, appearing completely unbothered by it all. “Is that why—? The Met's up the block, you could—”

“Why would I report it?” Zayn asks, tone curious. Sterile.

Liam purses his lips. “You're bleeding.”

“Funny thing, though, no one seems bothered but you,” Zayn notes, quirking one of his thick brows reproachfully. He tips his glass back, draining it with another hearty swallow. “Best be getting back to your mates.” He stands.

Without his express input, Liam's hand lands on Zayn's arm. It's the same spot he'd rubbed circles into that night barely a week ago, some attempt to soothe the boy who had stood there shaking from fear after a near-mugging.

The same boy who stands before him now, haughty and indifferent with blood smearing his face.

Liam has a lot of questions.

“Do you have a safe way home?” is what comes out. 

Zayn smiles, placid and loose from liquor. “Do I look particularly interested in what's safe _,_ Detective Inspector?” He pulls out of Liam's grip like silk through careless fingers. 

He's slipped out the door before Liam’s got his bearings, before he thinks to ask the kid _why._ Why—any of it. The questions won’t coalesce, though, intangible as smoke, and they fade as the moment does.

When the detective returns to the table, thoughts foggy and muddled, Tomlinson is holding court. 

“And then he looks at me, right, and we both start laughing, 'cause the muffin's in the wall—”

“Is that some weird northern euphemism?” Liam interjects, setting down the sweating beers one at a time as he loosens his fingers from around them. He slides in beside Tomlinson. “Y'owe me a fiver.”

“Fuck o—” Louis begins, but he closes his mouth and shakes his head instead, fishing into his pocket for the cash. “Point is: if I hadn't been so lazy, I would have _eaten_ it and put that shit in my body. Preservatives are basically black magic.”

Everyone laughs. Liam has clearly missed something. The strange, dreamlike moment at the bar has him wondering if that's not a recurring problem.

The topic has moved on to general teasing when Tomlinson's elbow hits Liam just under his ribcage. 

He answers Liam's long-suffering glare with, “What was _that?_ With the bloke with the bruises.”

It's quiet, an undertone just for them. Liam's been working with Tomlinson the entirety of his time with the Met. He'll never understand how someone who spends most of their day wrist-deep in human remains can be so perceptive of the living.

“That was...” Liam begins, just as lowly. He pivots in his mind for the right word. “Confusing.”

Tomlinson snorts. “Need to stop letting you hang with Styles,” he mutters into the lip of his glass. “Makes you cryptic.”

Liam's brow pinches. He shakes his head slowly and sips from his own glass. “Dunno what else to call it.”

“You acted like you knew him,” Tomlinson notes.

That comment is a lead. Liam considers it.

The shaken boy huddled into himself on the sidewalk a few days ago. The disaffected kid at the bar, blood drying on his lips. 

It's not a lie when Liam says, “I don't.” Soft, sleepy eyes. Blank, burning stare. “I really do not.”

Liam shepherds the group back to the Met after they finish the round. They end up going in a circle around the table, coming up with new angles for the investigation as the day dies outside the windows.

They burn out somewhere between a suggestion that they analyze the font preferences of different socioeconomic brackets and a proposal that they hold an open call for new medical staff specializing in dissections.

“Okay,” Liam concedes over his own rumble of dark laughter. He rubs at his forehead as he says, “Delevingne, Cabello and Kloss, you're free to go. We start again tomorrow at eight sharp; text me if you think of anything. Horan,” he turns to the man next to him. Horan sits with his face resting on the heel of his hand, gaze spacey. His eyes are the color of the sky at noon and just as distant. They focus back in on Liam as he speaks. “You're coming with me to the catacomb.”

Everyone begins packing up, stretching and chatting quietly. 

Tomlinson is the exception. “So what, I just hover in stasis until tomorrow? Shröedinger's forensics specialist?”

Liam rolls his eyes, gathering his unnecessary jacket as he does. “Figured you'd tag along. As usual.”

“I don't do that,” Louis denies.

“You do that  _so hard,_ _”_ Horan accuses, but there's a smile lighting his eyes.

“I don't do that, and—Niall, shut up—and actually,  _Detective Inspectors_ , I have more reason to be there than either of you,” Louis says with a sniff and shrugs into a gray hoodie, sleeves immediately pushed up his forearms.

“Harassing the medical examiner isn't a legitimate reason,” Delevingne calls over her shoulder, ridiculous stork legs taking her out of the building and onto her evening faster than any of them.

“Cara's got a point,” Niall decides.

Louis pushes his messy fringe out of his face with blunt nails. “I'm a fucking pathologist,” he mutters defensively, but lets it drop.

The morgue—the catacomb, as their team has come to call it—is roughly a million floors down from the investigation’s office at the Yard. Liam leans up against the wall of the lift, keeps half an ear to Louis and Niall's chatter as they descend. They’re all close and the sound of them is nearly soothing, how the detective remembers the brook by his childhood home being.

“So you're saying you wouldn't bend him over.”

Well.  _Soothing._ Bit of a strong word.

“I'm saying that this conversation is over, Horan,” Louis retorts.

“And I'm saying you both need to be on your A-game for a minute, alright?” Liam insists. “Lou, this being your playing field and all, I need your eyes keen on whatever they have for us. Mind sharp. You know.”

Louis does. He nods and keeps silent, flicking Niall only once under the eye as they exit the lift and sidle past the sliding glass door of the morgue. Niall squawks, grabbing indignantly for the clever fingers that are quick to move away.

The morgue at Scotland Yard is chilly and oppressively clean and, despite being a couple levels down from his own personal office, one of Tomlinson's favorite places in the building. It hadn't taken anyone who'd been down to the catacomb very long to figure out why.

“Heyyyy,” calls the medical examiner from where he's looking over—something, held in a pair of silver tweezers. As they stride into the room in a cluster, Liam squints at it. Semi-translucent, tiny and curved and sickly white.

“That a maggot?” Tomlinson chirps, already delighted.

Horan shakes his head at Liam's side.

“Pulled off your stiff, yeah,” the examiner confirms in a low drawl. He looks up to smile at Tomlinson, soft, and waves with one gloved hand when he notices Liam and Horan hovering a safe distance away. “Liam. Nialler.”

“Styles,” Liam greets. He looks at the spread of Petri dishes, shades of brown and green and burgundy staining them. “Anything good?”

“Kind of relative, good and bad,” Styles waffles, setting the maggot down on a sterile pad with intense care, “but, like. Yeah.”

Liam's scowl is more habitual than anything. He doesn't mind Styles, really, doesn't know much of his background—Tomlinson might, but if so guards that information jealously—just that he's smart enough to do what he does and sociable enough to make it easier when their paths cross.

An inevitable occurrence, cops and corpses having the relationship they do.

“What've you got?” Horan asks. He has his notebook out, eyeing Styles' spread of sample dishes inquisitively.

Good man, Horan. Diligent.

“Oh,” Tomlinson murmurs, eyebrow arching as he stares down at one of the redder dishes. “ _Oh._ _”_

“Right?” Styles says, arm brushing the pathologist's when he leans into him. “Had to run it five times before I was sure, the—”

“The cold, yeah,” Tomlinson cuts in. His hip bumps Styles', overly familiar. “How'd you get it to—?

“Gents?” Horan interjects. “Care to share with the class?”

“Speak it like they're five, Haz,” Tomlinson says in an undertone.

Styles opens his mouth. His large green eyes are strange under the unforgiving light, bright against skin made pale by long hours in the lab. “The maggots in your corpse's body came from flies.” 

“Imagine that,” Liam says dryly.

“Yeah, well, the flies were attracted by decay, obviously,” Styles continues, tone methodical and unbothered. He's toying with the top of his blue latex glove, gaze sweeping over the row of samples in front of him. “This is the first body you've brought me that was in such an advanced state.”

“Found her in her office building,” Tomlinson explains. “Custodian did, rather. Long weekend.” 

Styles winces. “That'd do it.” He looks back up, meets Liam's eye and then Horan's. “What's funny about the particular genus of fly that lays—” he taps the pad with the maggot on it “—these little fellows, is that they only show up after the first...let's say 32 hours of decomposition.”

“Funny,” Horan agrees gamely. “And then what?”

“They lay eggs,” Tomlinson pipes up, “just a bunch of nasty little babies everywhere.” He flickers his eyes between them. “And then the babies  _eat._ _”_

Gross, but not revolutionary. “I'm not sure why that's...I mean...” The pair of medical professionals stare at Liam with twin expressions, slate-blank as he talks. “So?”

“So  _when_ they eat,” Styles says, tone indicating he's trying very hard to speak on their level, “they eat the decomposing flesh. And whatever's in it.” 

“Right,” Horan agrees. “Still not—”

“Our bodies hold a lot of hidden chemistry,” Tomlinson supplies. He pokes at the agar on one of the Petri dishes with a pinky. Styles softly slaps him away, hand lingering over top of his. “So, for example, when a vic eats a lot of potassium-rich food, we can trace that in their bodies later.” 

“Only, some chemical signatures take time to form, and some dissipate—pretty rapidly, really. Sometimes just a few hours,” Styles mumbles, strange eyes already back on his maggots and samples.

Someone hurries a cart by on the other side of the morgue's doors, a bad wheel squeaking as it goes. It's the only sound while Tomlinson and Styles wait for the Detective Inspectors to put it together.

“So, the maggots...” Horan trails in. His fair brow is creased as he stares hard at the line of samples. “They eat those chemicals that would otherwise...disappear.”

“Dissipate, yeah,” Tomlinson says. 

Oh. “So they're like a record of the chemicals decomp would otherwise erase,” Liam surmises. 

“Exactly,” Styles agrees, beaming when he looks at Liam. His smile carves a devastating crater of a dimple into his cheek, a compliment to the dark scrollwork of curls that brush his jaw.

So maybe Liam kind of gets Tommo's thing with him.

“Alright then. What showed up?” Horan asks, pen poised over paper once more.

Tomlinson's canines are sharp when he smiles. “You're gonna like this.”

 

“Smoking dulls mental capability, by the way.”

Liam leans his head back against the wall, exhaling a plume of nicotine. He's supposed to be further from the doors of the Met, ordinances say, but it's late in the evening and who, exactly, is meant to enforce that? Him?

“What a game-changing piece of information.” He inhales another long drag, the cherry of the cigarette burning bright, and doesn't give in to the impulse to look toward the already-familiar voice. “I'd no idea.”

“Mouthy,” Zayn murmurs, sidling up until their arms almost touch. He mirrors Liam, leaning back against the concrete.

“What are you doing here?” Liam asks on an exhale.  _Why do you keep showing up?_

“Out for a walk,” Zayn returns easily. “Not actually all that far from campus, y'know.”

Liam is still deciding whether he thinks that's the truth when Zayn says, “I shouldn't have let you see me the other day. With the—” his hand waves in front of his face. A week later, the bruise marring his jaw seems to have cleared, though the murky lighting makes it hard for Liam to tell. “That was irresponsible.” His face shows no contrition when he says, “I apologize.”

“You—okay,” Liam stumbles. “Apologize for what?”

He senses more than sees Zayn's eye roll. “Showing up in your neighborhood. Making you feel responsible for what I get up to.”

It's maybe a little chilling, how completely Zayn managed to read that brief moment at the pub days earlier. Did he do it all at once? Did he piece it together and come here once he had?

Has it been running through his brain the way Liam can’t seem to stop it from running through his?  

“Do you go around picking fights?” Liam asks, voicing a conclusion all his own. He turns fully to Zayn, clad in a Henley that reveals the tips of inky feathers and something red beneath where the buttons clasp. “Is that a thing for you?”

The younger man's brow wrinkles. “A  _thing,_ _”_ he muses with the ghost of a smile. “Could be.”

Liam's eyes close against the admission, frustrated breath coming through his nose in a hot stream. “Why?” he asks. “Why were you so shaken up by that mugger, then?”

Zayn's head tilts a little, half gravity and half carelessness. “You're not asking what you really want to know.”

He's so slight where he leans, compact in a way Liam associates with vipers. With pistols. 

Lethality contained, but only just.

“You're studying for a...what, a dual doctorate in the sciences, but you're not bright enough to know you should avoid picking fights in alleyways.” Liam means it to be offhand and conversational, but it’s betrayed by the rough timbre of his voice. Disapproval and curiosity, both.

Zayn notices. He would. Liam can tell by the twist of his full mouth, a crooked smirk on glass-cut features. “One can boast a high intelligence quotient and still need a bit of a kick. _You_ know.” 

The words burn somewhere in Liam's sternum. “Wouldn't argue 'needing a bit of a kick' is a good indicator of intelligence,” he observes. He drags in another measure of smoke, showy about it for the way it makes Zayn’s expression narrow. “Curious how much your parents had to shell out to make it worth the uni's while for a trouble-seeker like you.” It's a little meaner than it needs to be, colored darker shades by Liam's own tiring day.

Styles is still analyzing soil samples from different areas along the Thames—whatever type of maggot he found on their corpse, it apparently favors river systems—and trying to narrow down possible points along its stretch where the latest victim may have had her life ended. It’s slow going, a lead that’s literally bug-sized. It’s not much to give Winston when he calls Liam up to his office so he can feel involved. Not much to combat the disapproval in his gaze.

And last night was—bad, images of note cards wedged into exposed brain matter jolting Liam awake, so the detective isn’t in the best place for this, another strange interaction with Zayn that on a good day would still only feel half real.

Zayn laughs, though, delight in the squeeze of his eyes when he tilts his head back slightly, and Liam doesn't find himself regretting the bite of his words.

“You're fun,” Zayn says, voice still lit with amusement. “No, though.”

“No?”

“My parents didn't spend a pound,” Zayn elaborates. He tilts his head toward him where they're staring each other down, still leaning side by side on the wall of the Yard. “Full scholarship, stipend included.” He pulls at his earlobe, the black stud of an earring there, and adds, a touch smug, “ _Someone_  thinks I'm plenty worth the hassle.”

“Stipend not afford you cab fare, then?” Liam asks. 

There's something satisfying in the way Zayn's expression twists. The way his lips edge toward a pout, not quite getting there before he reigns it back in. “That’d be a waste,” Zayn mutters, eyes dark and not meeting Liam's own.

“Why am I always the one who finds you?” Liam asks, abrupt like the way he thought it.

Zayn’s expression, still indirect, holds a sudden effervescence that shines dark. “What makes you think you're the only one who ever finds me?”

As Liam processes the words, there's a tug of—something, in his chest, seething and hot. He rolls his wrists to dispel the tension in the sinew.

This conversation is a lot of things, intriguing and maddening, addictive in its circular flow, but it’s hardly productive. Liam snubs his fag against the wall behind him, dropping the butt.

“I've got something to get back to,” he mutters, shoulder blades taking the brunt of his weight as he pushes off the wall. “Please don't indulge your—thing, when you head back to campus.” 

He's within paces of the entrance when he hears Zayn's response. “Would it bother you if I did?”

Liam wheels, agitated beyond reason. “I'm a cop, mate, so  _yes._ _”_ Then, when all Zayn does is smirk knowingly, “What do you want _?_ _”_ He realizes, belatedly, that he sounds more intrigued than annoyed. There's not much for it.

“Just to see you,” Zayn replies, eyes honey-clear. “I'm simple like that.” 

There's no mistaking the flash of heat in Liam's gut this time. “Go study something,” he manages.

“It's summer, Detective Inspector,” Zayn mocks quietly, but he's backing down the block, hypnotic and slow.

Vipers. Pistols. Liam always has been big on metaphors.

Back inside, Cabello looks up from a series of crime scene photos and frowns hard at him. “I might be pointing out the obvious here, but I don't think smoking agrees with you, Payne,” she says. Her eyes flicker back to the images under her splayed hands. “You look peaky.”

“Bad habit,” Liam says absently, drifting toward his own pile of evidence. He feels half blind. “Really, really fucking deadly habit.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I think you're very, very good at getting people to do what you want,” Liam says, “but if I didn't think you knew your shit, you wouldn't be here right now.”_   
>    
>  _Zayn is quiet, considering that. Then, “I do so love a nice ride in a police cruiser.”_   
>    
>  _“You usually sitting in the front, then?” Liam asks._   
>    
>  _A snort. “As if you don’t already know.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh cool, you're back.  
>   
> Many thanks to Monica for everything forever. Many many thanks to all of you who messaged me with kind words. You're all swell. I really hope you like it.  
>   
> Find me at protagonist-m on tumblr. Y'know, if you wanna. I'm not the boss of you.

It's not boring, poking at corpses, except for when it kind of is. 

“Blunt force trauma,” Liam declares blandly. “I would bet, like. Twenty quid.”

“Spot on,” Tomlinson murmurs, gloves barely ghosting over the purple indent in the victim's head. “Should've bet more.”

“Have to agree,” Styles says with a snap of his gum. Something spearmint, Liam thinks.

Tomlinson clasps his hands. “Glad we got that sorted.” He begins prying his mobile out of the restrictive pockets of his trousers. Despite not technically being _in_ the detective division, the man abuses the plain dress allowed to them like no one Liam’s ever known. “So there's this good little falafel place down the way that doesn't really deliver, but they said they'd cut the station a deal—”

“Actually,” Styles says, turning to Tomlinson and securing long fingers gently around the man’s bicep, making the pathologist go over all soft, “there's one more thing I was hoping to ask you about.”

Liam suppresses the groan sitting low in his throat. It’s one thing to visit the morgue on their lunch because Louis is pushyand gets obsessive over pretty people with medical degrees, but Styles should know better than anyone: there’s work to be done upstairs. Particularly since he himself used his tests with the maggots to narrow down where their last victim might have been taken apart, given the team enough to start investigating potential locations of the murder. Liam isn’t sitting well in his own skin, feels restless where he’s tapping a staccato beat onto the edge of the long metal table.

Horan can handle running things for the time it’ll take them to wrap this up, Liam knows. It’s still not the same as being there.

“Let us have it,” Tomlinson says in a way Liam will have to lecture him for later.

“Last week this man suffering from senility keels over,” Styles explains. “Which—sad, yeah?”

“Yeah,” the pair echo—Tomlinson a tad dreamily, the freak.

“Only...” Styles continues. Not that he’s proud of it, but Liam mostly tunes it out.

It's not apathy—the detective isn't sure he knows  _how_ to do apathy, if he's honest—but there's a detachment born of sleep deprivation and stress and preoccupation, a low buzz of gray all through his bones.

He feels like he sees Zayn's slight figure everywhere. The other day, a woman in the grocery's dark pixie cut was the exact same shade of raven as Zayn's. Liam spent a truly depressing amount of time examining the way light bounced off the strands. This morning, his eyes followed the shape of a leather jacket—the wrong cut, on shoulders too broad—for two blocks while Loki sniffed along and tested how much give Liam would allow on the lead.

Mentally, it’s not the ideal place for Liam to be.

Physically, it’s also not the ideal place for Liam to be.

“We'll let you know, that's...weird,” Tomlinson is saying, fingertips light at Styles' hip. Liam’s feeling churlish enough to tell them to take a minute in the office to sort themselves out. Get it out of their systems.

He's on the verge of it when the text from Winston comes through. It’s telling them to wrap up the impromptu visit to the catacomb.

A situation has arisen.

“Tomlinson,” Liam says slowly. He reads the words on his mobile over again. “Lou, we gotta go.”

Louis' eyebrows jump at Liam's change in demeanor. “What's up?”

“They found another body,” Liam answers. “There's been another murder.” 

 

They find him behind the shipment center he presumably works—worked—in. A name tag dangles from his bloodied shirt that reads  _Samir._ Late summer heat is doing nothing for his exposed organs and the heart sitting heavy in his hand. 

At least it's recent.

In the other hand he clutches a note, because they always have the fucking note. Liam finishes his outward spiral of evidence collection and comes back to the body at the epicenter, grabbing the pristine note card before Tomlinson has a chance to.

_Dreaming of you, Detective Inspector Payne. Please accept this token of my affections._

He'd been so sure he was past feeling sick over these.

“Haul him back, we'll check in after we finish up here,” Horan is directing the transport crew. “Josh, keep your mobile close for when we nail down a proper ID, yeah?”

Samir, the poor bastard, looks only a bit older than Liam. He wonders if 'next of kin' means parents for him like it does for the DI, or if he has someone waiting at home. Children.

Kloss comes to hover over him, taps the base of Liam's spine with her boot. “Do you need a minute?” she asks, quiet.

It’s the second body this month. “Need us to work double time,” Liam grunts, rising from where he kneels, “so we can get back to nailing this fucker to the wall.”

Urgency pervades the crime scene’s closeout. Liam hasn't felt that in a while. It's never something to drag out, forensics so often a battle against time, but Liam absolutely blows through the last of the scene's processing. He's dark energy and efficient fingers on endless plastic bags, short descriptions on anything— _anything_ —that could be of use to them.

Something has to come of this.

The sun is dying behind the London skyline when the team piles into cars that'll take them back to the station. Work has just begun.

With this in mind, Liam texts ahead to ask Nelson to turn on the coffee pot if she's back already to process photos. Her reply chirps back on his mobile a moment later and he allows himself to sink into the door of the passenger side, some friction-heavy headspace between spent and determined.

After a long bout of silence, Horan speaks. “Does it freak you out?”

His eyes don’t leave the street as he navigates, steady hands on the wheel a counterpoint to the hesitation in his tone.

Turmoil that runs deeper than bone sits under the detective’s skin when he rasps, “Which part?”

“The notes, man.” Horan keeps the words level, steadying against the uptick of Liam's heartbeat at even the mention. “The little love notes.”

Liam meets Tomlinson's eye in the rear view mirror briefly. The pathologist’s expression tightens as he catches the silent plea.

“Don't know how they  _couldn't_ freak a bloke out,” he interjects, leaning slightly forward into the gap between the front seats. “More than a bit creepy, isn’t it.” 

Liam nods a little by way of agreement, not quite up to opening his mouth and acknowledging the topic.

“You're not—” Horan begins. His face pinches slightly inward as he deliberates on his words. “It's not  _because_  of you, Payno. You know?” He shifts, maybe a little uncomfortable with how he’s extending himself here. “They were…they were always gonna die. That sounds, I know it sounds fucking awful, but—they were going to kill them regardless. Those notes, whatever game the killer’s playing, they don't make this your fault.”

Liam finds himself a little light on agreement. The words  _token of my affections_ are still rattling in his skull, superimposed over eight earlier messages. An increasingly morbid collage.

He's still surprised Winston put him on the case at all, doesn't find himself completely sold on the gambit that the killer might be drawn out by Liam's continued attention to the murders. Like maybe Liam will eventually notice something the others don't.

Like maybe the killer and he share a personal connection.

Only Liam doesn't make a habit of associating with serial killers, does he, and the implication that he's somehow in tune with this particular criminal psyche is beginning to wear. It’s a hell of an accusation, for all it's remained an undertone. 

When they return to the Yard, Liam is wordlessly made to understand that Louis and Niall will be accompanying him to Winston’s office for the debrief. When he raises his eyebrows in question, the answer is there in the set of Niall’s jaw. It’s there in the warmth of Louis’ hand at his elbow.

Part of him wants to tell them he’s a big boy, can handle it on his own, even nerve-wracked and beaten down. He doesn’t, though. That must say enough.

By the time they reach his office, Winston is making moves like he’s heading out for the night.

“Tell me you're making  _some_  headway, at least,” he groans after their spare summary of events. The man slips into a dark cardigan and gathers his rucksack, attention only half on them.

“Getting there,” Tomlinson offers. It's fully noncommittal, a tone Liam only ever hears from the pathologist when he’s dealing with his less-loved superiors. “Still need to look over the newest vic.”

“Yeah, do that,” Winston says absently. He’s squeezed past them, halfway out the door of his office, when he calls over his shoulder. “Payne. Talk to me in the hall for a minute.”

Liam nods, a bit curt. Follows Winston without giving himself a chance to stall.

The door clicks behind them, Tomlinson and Horan moving slowly down the hall with their heads angled ever so slightly back. A different day and Liam would huff a laugh at how their ears are clearly straining, even as their feet do a reluctant shuffle away.

Winston has his arms crossed, expectant under a furrowed brow. “No progress, then,” he prompts.

Liam opens his mouth. Hesitates.

The expression on Winston's face falls perceptibly. “Dammit, Payne.”

“No, I know,” Liam begins, “I know how it looks.”

“It looks like nine dead bodies,” Winston chastises, hand splayed out in front of him. “It looks like Cowell and the media breathing down my neck for answers.”

Liam waits to hear any mention of the nine families left grieving. Feels his spine prickle when none materializes. “We  _did_  pick up potential locations for the murders,” he reminds. “The morgue, we—it's not as if we've been doing nothing.”

Winston waves it away. “They didn't want me to put you on this one, you know.”

The feeling like a mechanical failure is Liam's stuttering heart. “I'm aware.”

“Because of the notes.”

An exhale on a count of four. “I know.”

Winston cocks his head, taking in the Detective Inspector in front of him. Liam can only imagine he looks how he feels: tired, paper-thin.

“You can imagine that there's a lot of glory to be gained if you crack this,” Winston says, grandiose with his quiet words. “But it's a hell of a thing to fuck up, too.”

Liam knows this. All of it. It doesn't change the fact that there's no defense he could give right now—months in and _barely_ beginning to solve this thing—that wouldn't ring hollow in the cold corridor.

“I put some faith in you,” Winston states, hitching his rucksack up further over his shoulder. “Liam. I want to see that repaid with results.”

“You will,” Liam assures him. “To the—the best of my ability, I can say that you will.” 

Winston just grunts a small noise like disbelief. He pairs it with a smile, disarming to drive the barb deeper. An expert of his craft.

“Evening, Payne,” the man murmurs, and brushes past the detective.

When Liam’s seated back at his desk, rifling through one of the six piles of evidence he's had rotating—futilely—through their team, he sighs long and low and unsatisfied.

Horan might not be the only one to notice, but he’s the one to comment. “How’d that go, then?” he asks from behind his own pile of documents. He sounds like he knows.

Liam just stares at the fake wood grain of his desk. “Guess,” he encourages. “Take a...take a wild swing.”

“Does Ben _know_ he’s case supervisor?” Delevingne chips in from the sofa across the room, adjusting the files piled in her lap. The others turn to look at her, bleary-eyed.

“Cara,” Liam rebukes. It’s half-hearted at best.

“No, you’re right. He’s done a stellar job,” Delevingne decides. “Not like it’s us who’ve been busting our arses since December or anything. It's a cake walk, really.”

“Tralala,” Tomlinson agrees in a monotone over where he's got what looks to be a forensics report tipped upside down, “lalala...la.”

Liam hums out a groan, rotating his neck on his shoulders. He's holding the note from victim five in his hand, neat print and  _All my loving thoughts to the illustrious Inspector Payne_  ringing cold between his ears. “Anyone have any personal assignments?”

A few noises that might be agreement. 

“Work on them now,” Liam instructs. “Bank this for the next ninety minutes, we'll go back over interviews with friends and family then.” 

It's as good a plan as any until they can examine potential locations of the murders in the morning, and the grumbling is only general and low-level as the team gathers things from their desks, off to make calls or peruse individual work.

Ever productive, Liam sits with his fingers pressed into his eyelids, only breathing.

He shouldn't be on this case. He shouldn't be within a  _mile_  of it. Policy on allowing an officer repeatedly named by a wanted criminal is clear. Or it’s—it’s _meant_ to be, seems to grow murkier every time Liam thinks to question it.

Winston always speaks of _lack of precedent_ and _exceptional circumstance._ It doesn’t change the way the entire bleeding situation feels to Liam as though he’s been locked into a chair, eyes held open by unforgiving hands while gruesome images play across a screen to the soundtrack of _your fault, your fault, all on you._

“Li,” comes a soft voice. 

“Tommo,” Liam garbles out. He's always so tired lately.  

“Wanna look over Styles' wonky case with me?” Tomlinson bribes, voice lilting like he thinks he can gentle Liam out of his bad mood.

“Do I have to move?” Liam asks in a flat whine.

“Nah.” He hears Tomlinson drop into a chair he scoots to the edge of Liam's desk, like they're partnering up in school. “Might have to come up with a background in neurology though, the chemistry on it's like—”

“Neurology?” Liam lowers his hands from his face, blinking to clear the dark spots from his vision as he turns to Tomlinson.

The pathologist lifts one imperious brow. “You didn't listen to Harry's explanation at  _all_ , did you,” he accuses. “He worked so hard to dumb it down for you, too.”

Liam doesn't take the bait. Ample as it is. “I might have a solution.” 

Tomlinson’s crafted expression falls to one of earnest intrigue. It’s a better look for him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” The detective fishes his mobile from his pocket, joints vaguely aching with the movement in the hard chair.

Tomlinson rests his hand on his chin and leans in. “Do take your time,” he encourages, acerbic, “not like I've been agonizing over this.”

“Drama queen,” Liam returns, casting about for the hard copy of the incident report. “Hand me—ta,” he finishes when Tomlinson passes him a neglected pad of paper, the latest report scribbled onto the topmost sheet.

He finds the number and dials, mind swirling. 

One ring, then another. Another. An—

“Hullo,” comes a voice, tired slur so pronounced Liam might almost not recognize it.

He does, though. “Zayn Malik?” he clarifies anyway.

“That's me,” agrees the voice on the other end, drawl sweet and lazy as the boy gains coherence.

“It’s Li—Detective Inspector Payne. From the…Met.” Liam's brow knits. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Uh.” A sound like rasping cotton. “In a manner of speaking.” Then, muffled and so distorted Liam knows he’s not meant to hear it, “Wake up. Wake—leave. What do _you_ think, _now._ Christ.”

A shock of something that has Liam's mouth running dry. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Nothing interesting,” Zayn assures him, indifference blue-gray in his tone. “Something you want?”

“Er.” Liam struggles to gather his scattered thoughts. Tomlinson looks on, amusement plain where he takes in the heat Liam can feel building on his face, the tips of his ears. “Yeah, there's. You're a neurology doctoral candidate, and—”

“And biology,” Zayn interjects, tone managing both distance and petulance. Liam hears a door close rather forcibly on the other end of the line.

Liam exhales a laugh under his breath. “Yes, I know.” 

“Just making sure.”

His lips are most definitely not twitching into a smile. “Yeah yeah, proper impressive. Look, there's a case at the Yard that's stumping the morgue and myself. Some death related to brain chemistry imbalance that looks suspicious. Was wondering if you might have time.”

Zayn hums, an exhale like he's stretching. “'S nearly ten on a Friday, Detective Inspector.” 

“Yeah,” Liam goads, grin inching onto his lips uninhibited now.

He can hear Zayn mulling it over. “Why should I bother to come all the way down to Scotland Yard?” the boy finally asks. “I was doing something.”

“I'll come get you,” Liam offers quickly, thinking of wine-colored imprints on smooth skin. “It wasn't anything important, said so yourself.”

“He wasn't,” Zayn admits absently. Liam refuses to let it set his teeth on edge. “Is this your way of saying you miss me?” the boy asks, casual as anything as he pierces Liam through a mobile line.

“You won't know if you don't agree to come.” Liam drums nervous fingers on the table. “Unless you know you can’t deliver on all the talk.” 

For all that Liam knows how to prod people along, he might be outclassed, here. “You want me to come down there,” Zayn asserts.

This kid. “Is that what you need to hear to play along?” Liam asks, pinching the bridge of his nose against the insistent throb forming at the front of his skull.

An immaculate laugh, clean and ringing through the speaker. “I don't need anything from you.” 

Liam considers that. “Fair enough,” he concedes. “Have a good ni—”

“Be here in fifteen or I won't do it,” Zayn mumbles, the end tone beeping a moment later.

Liam sets his mobile back down, disbelief owning his features.

When he looks over he sees Tomlinson licking his lips. His cheeks always hollow inward when he's pushing back amusement. “That the kid you bailed on the scene for the other night?” he asks archly.

Liam mutters something vague about traffic and grabs his jacket, Tomlinson's laughter following him out the door.

He makes it, but it's the least righteous use of the sirens he’s ever heard of. Zayn shuffles out the door of his flat in rumpled clothing, leaving Liam to pretend he can't smell sweat and mixed cologne on him. The boy gives him all of two seconds to get used to his presence before he starts throwing the detective off-balance.

“You  _did_  want to see me,” he decides, gaslight triumph in his eyes.

The street they're driving down is dark enough that Liam thinks it might even hide the tremor on his lips when he breathes out. “Wanted your expertise.” He quirks the boy a wry little smile from the corner of his mouth without looking over. “Unless the scholarships were for talking a big game and never actually doing anything. Which could _certainly_ be.”

He can see Zayn shuffle to face toward him more, knee bent with one of his clunky boots up on the seat. “You don't think I've worked for what I have.”

“I think you're very, very good at getting people to do what you want,” Liam says, measured like the days he spent forming that conclusion, “but if I didn't think you knew your shit, you wouldn't be here right now.”

Zayn is quiet, considering that. Then, “I do so love a nice ride in a police cruiser.” 

“You usually sitting in the front, then?” Liam asks.

A snort. “As if you don’t already know.”

Fair enough, Liam thinks. Zayn’s record is clean, report on the attempted mugging aside. No record of a Zayn Malik in the database. No prior criminal offenses. It was an admitted relief when Liam cast surreptitious eyes over the digital records.

Indisputably mystifying, though. Either Zayn isn't as wild as he wants Liam to think, or the boy is very clever about it. Hours after staring down the nearly nonexistent record, Liam was left grainy-eyed and twitching in bed, still twisting himself up over what it meant, or didn't mean, or if it even mattered.

“The case I'm pulling you in for is something bumped over to us from St. Bart's,” he says instead of admitting any of that. “Seemed standard, until the morgue couldn't figure out how dementia could have affected an individual so rapidly.”

His gaze flickers over long enough to see Zayn give him a look. “Dementia has an onset period ranging from years to days, that's not—”

“We're talking hours,” Liam says. He finds something in the way Zayn goes completely silent immensely gratifying. “It read like dementia, but it took no time at all.” He pulls the car up to the station's lot, easing into a space.

Zayn breathes out audibly. “Cool.”

Liam's brow knits. “Is it?”

“Isn't it?” Opening his door and hopping out with more enthusiasm than Liam had thought him capable of, Zayn smiles. It’s an easy form of devastation.

Liam turns toward the door leading in from the lot. “Stick close, please.”

They’re halfway down the hall to the office when Zayn asks, “Don’t I get a visitor’s brochure? A commemorative pin and that?”

Now is probably the time to mention to the boy that he's not, strictly speaking, meant to be here. It’s Zayn, though, so what comes out of Liam’s mouth is, “If you disrupt anyone or anything unrelated to the case I have you here for, you're leaving and you're not coming back.” He reconsiders as he opens the door to the office, ushering Zayn through. “Without handcuffs, anyway,” he modifies.

He pretends not to hear the boy’s murmured  _Is that an invitation?_

Everyone is where he left them. The exception is Cabello, now sprawled on the floor by the sofa with profiling reports covering her face.

Heads of team members perk up one by one to take in the messy hair and haughty expression of the boy at Liam's side. He watches his team react with dreary confusion that slides gradually into fascination, eyes flickering with interest for the first time all day.

He supposes Zayn is rather appealing in that way. Before he opens his mouth.

“Alright,” Liam begins, clasping his hands together and standing with his feet nearly shoulder-width apart, “this is Zayn. He's a doctoral student and he's going to be helping me with a case this evening.”

Horan’s hand slowly raises.

“He is absolutely not supposed to be here,” Liam adds. The hand drops. “As far as anyone is concerned, Zayn is only stopping in for a quick personal visit. You don’t remember his name. You _barely_ remember his face.” There’s a snort from Kloss where she loiters by the coffee maker. Liam pretends not to hear it. “He may as well have never. Been. Here. Does that make sense to everyone?” 

A few murmurs of assent.

“Cabello,” Liam prompts the woman on the floor.

“Understood, sir,” Cabello responds, voice vibrating against the paper resting over her mouth, “how nice of your pal to stop by and say hello, sir. What’s his name? I’ve already forgotten.” 

“Sorted,” Liam mutters. He nods toward his desk, leaving Zayn to trail in his wake.

Which…he does not. Liam supposes he should have known.

“What'd I say about touching stuff,” he grumbles, grabbing at a case file Zayn's pulled off of Cabello's unattended desk.

Zayn spins out of reach, though, eyes intent on the introductory info page. “Never said a word about touching.”

“It was imp—give it here, c'mon.” Liam catches him around the wrist, prying the file from his hand. “This was  _not_  the agreement.”

“Oh no,” Zayn says, dispassionate. 

This close, Liam has to look very slightly down into Zayn's eyes. The squabble for the file has left Zayn more or less sandwiched between Liam and the desk, heat of his thighs radiating through the denim of Liam's jeans where they're nearly pressed together. 

“Behave,” Liam insists, fingers burning where they're still holding Zayn's wrist.

Something goes smoky in Zayn's eyes. Liam looks away in what he tells himself isn't cowardice.

“Tommo,” he calls to the pathologist, “c'mere a minute.” He quickly tucks himself into his desk chair, relieved when Zayn does nothing more but drag himself into one of the spares.

Tomlinson spends the next half hour of debrief silently eyeing Zayn up in a way that would be predatory if it wasn't spliced with amused glances at Liam. Occasionally he'll correct some piece of medical trivia Liam hasn't quite pinned down, but mostly he's a sliver of repressed laughter, eyes glowing with it.

Liam feels a migraine come on as Zayn interrupts him every few words to make a snarky comment or redirect the conversation toward the file he'd picked up.

“So then they thought it might be  _lesions,_ related to, like, unwitting stimulant abuse, but—”

“So are the hearts removed with or without the surrounding arteries?” Zayn asks. Like this is an ongoing conversation they're having. Like Liam wasn't directly in the middle of explaining something to him.

It can only be assumed that Tomlinson's laugh is directed at Liam, who kind of wants to brain himself with that weird heavy stapler no one uses and be done with it. “I thought you were interested in helping,” he strains. He's tapping a pen against the desk hard enough that he's surprised it hasn't snapped.

Surprised he hasn’t.

Zayn gives him a look that mixes surprise and contempt, like he's shocked by how far behind Liam is. “What, this?” He flicks the medical report in Liam's hand. The sound of rippling paper is jarring, startling the rest of the team where they pretend they aren't watching from behind computer monitors and mugs of tea. “Figured it out ages ago. Been waiting for you to stop talking.”

Liam licks over his lips. “You figured it out,” he repeats, vision threatening to swim from irritation.

“It's obvious, isn't it?” Zayn says, soft voice only slightly mocking. Liam is fairly sure it's his glare that causes Zayn's smile to appear, sudden and bright. 

“Mate, if it were obvious we wouldn't be calling in child scientists,” Tomlinson tells him. 

Zayn turns to him, affront building in the sinew of his wrists, the shade of his eyes.

And it's weird, the way the beginning of what will most certainly be a mindfuck of a barbed comment comes from Zayn's mouth. It's weird, the way he clamps his lips shut a moment later, eyes burning with something like fury.

It’s weird how Liam wants to soothe it away.

“Ignore him, Tomlinson is just...the way he is,” the detective says. He taps his pen and watches the men hold each other's stare in obvious challenge.

“No worries, man,” Zayn says, level, “when your expertise only extends to _inactive systems,_ you have to be a little bitter that someone else can do your job better than you. I get it.”

Tomlinson's eyes spark, blue flint. “I’ve been _doing my job_ just fine since before your balls dropped, kiddo,” he replies, words rounded by his northern accent's reappearance, prompted by Zayn's own.

“I could run circles around your degree,” snipes Zayn. The fluorescents of the room cast purple half-moons under his eyes, the spidery shadows of his thick fringe of lashes adding depth to his scowl.

The pathologist likely has a reply, fingers curling on the desk and thin mouth opened in a snarl. Liam isn't particularly interested.

“Tell us what you think, Zayn,” he says. He places two fingers on Tomlinson's elbow, rebuke and solidarity at once. Tomlinson is still simmering when his mouth snaps shut, teeth clicking.

Zayn rolls his head on his shoulders, shooting the pathologist a look of open, taunting provocation, and begins to explain.

Liam's life is observation. In the brief glimpses he's had, the detective has become well-acquainted with so many of Zayn's unconscious mannerisms. The drag of his teeth over longer syllables. The span of his shoulders when he's certain of something. The weight of his gaze late, late at night.

He's never seen him like this. The boy's speech is scalpel-neat, choppy Yorkshire syllables traded for coolly delivered medical terms rattled off with stunning precision of tongue. He doesn't offer a lot in the way of background for the cascading symptoms he's listing, the chemical causes underlying the pseudo-dementia, but the stunning clarity of speech makes Liam almost not care that he can't entirely follow. His ears interpret it as poetry, not explanation.

Tomlinson must understand it, anyway. A lilting handful of minutes later, the pathologist is swearing under his breath and nodding loosely, writing a summary on the case file. He signs off at the bottom with a hard scribble of his spiky signature.

Liam's fighting a losing battle with something treacherously like awe.

Zayn leans back, shoulder blades pressing to the chair. “Like I said,” he murmurs, nearly kittenish in how rubs at his eye with the back of his hand. “Obvious.” 

“That's...” Liam shakes his head very slightly, attempting to dispel some of his shock—and why, exactly, is he shocked, when this boy told him precisely what his field of study was, how advanced his understanding?

Tomlinson voices it before Liam can. “Bloody impressive.” He holds his hand out across the cluttered desk they're hunched over. “Didn't properly introduce meself before. Louis Tomlinson, head pathologist for the Yard.”

Zayn's eyebrow is quirked, dubious, but he pulls one arm from the back of his chair and reaches across to Tomlinson all the same. “Zayn Malik, doctoral candidate in Biology and Neurology at Queen Mary.”

They shake once, Zayn's grip a sight looser. The nod Tomlinson gives is short and perceptibly abashed. “Sorry. For the 'child' comment.”

“Good,” Zayn replies, though he doesn't seem particularly bothered—more like he's checking something off a list. His eyes stay on the other man as Liam stands and nudges at Zayn to do the same. 

It takes more than a moment to catch the boy’s attention, gaze still stuck on Tomlinson. Liam feels the twitchy, bothersome desire to flail around, or else clap very loudly. He doesn't let himself to think about why.

He does, however, kick lightly at the foot of Zayn's chair. “C'mon, then.” 

Zayn's stare slides to him in an unblinking line, glassy with the late hour. “What're  _you_  on about?”

Tomlinson snickers. Liam chews on the inside of his lip to keep himself in check. “As delightful as I find the notion of you being paid to annoy Tomlinson into submission, you're not. You don't actually...work here. At all.”

The look Zayn gives him communicates something very sardonic and deeply, deeply unimpressed.

He doesn't say anything, though, nor does he stand. Sinks further into the chair, if anything.

“I'm taking you home,” Liam clarifies, a bit stiff with the oddity of having his authority questioned so entirely. Of having it questioned _here._

Zayn lolls his head to the side, gaze indolent. “Let's negotiate.”

“Non-negotiable.”

“But let's.” Zayn brings one leg up on the chair and places his chin upon it, smiling with a charm Liam feels comfortable characterizing as  _devious_. “You let me finish reading that case file—”

“No.” The word is hard and sudden, catching the ears of the rest of the team.

Liam makes the vague note that Horan shoots Zayn an especially unhappy look, then, protective in the same vein as Rottweilers when it comes to his department. On estimate, Liam probably has less than a minute of this before the other Detective Inspector escorts Zayn out himself.

It ends up not mattering; whatever Zayn sees in Liam’s face is enough to convince him to cooperate, lanky legs unfolding and clunky boots dragging against the floor with an audible scuffing noise that grates on Liam's brittle nerves. The boy shoulders past him with a low-level glower and starts shuffling toward the door to the hall. Liam shoots one last long-suffering look at Tomlinson, who purses his lips and lifts his eyebrows. Liam reads it clear as day, the  _good luck with that_ on Louis’ face.

He shrugs and does something complicated with his expression that he hopes conveys the exact level of tired resignation to further annoyance he feels, and follows Zayn a step behind. As they weave through the desks, Liam ghosts a hand over Zayn's back, just above where his jacket's hem begins. Zayn, mercifully, keeps his hands at his sides instead of pawing through anything left out. Liam doesn't drop his hand, just in case.

When they're parked outside the boy's flat, Liam tells him, “I can't have you help if you can't follow rules.” 

It's plainly stated, devoid of anger or accusation. It's received in a similar tenor. Zayn gives him one of the those honey-amber looks Liam is quickly associating with late night and the acrid taste of biting something back. The boy licks his lips. “You want me to come back.”

The distance of the observation, the certainty—there's something to it. It has Liam’s head threatening to swim. Whatever it is, it’s tempered by a challenge he can’t help but rise to.

“Of course I want you to come back,” he defends, “did you  _hear_  yourself? You were—you had it figured within the hour.” He smiles a little at the memory, the thrill of watching someone be very, very good at something. “And you managed to make Louis feel stupid for a second, which. _That_ _’s_ always funny.” Mostly funny because Louis Tomlinson is the furthest thing from stupid, but watching him come to terms with a man seven years his junior schooling him in neurochemistry will never not be entertaining. 

The lingering smile fades when Liam turns to face Zayn fully. Takes in the set of his features.

“I won't come back,” Zayn says quietly, “and antagonize your pathologist and solve your cases, until you give up on this boring 'confidentiality' bit and let me look at that serial murder file.” 

Liam's lips are drawn into a thin line. “If I keep saying no, will it make  _any_  impact on you? Should I hire a sky-writer? Send it by telegraph?” He drums his fingers against the wheel once. “Suppose I could have it written on a cake.” 

A huff from the passenger side. “Why can I look at your really mundane cases and not anything that I'm actually interested in?” The words are harsh, but Liam reads the flicker of hurt on Zayn's face. “I’m just convenient, then? That how it is?”

The man swallows. “Of course not,” he says lowly, “but you're a civilian first and foremost— _beyond_  being a genius, Zayn,” he rushes when the boy opens his mouth, eyes vibrant with argument, “beyond being—weirdly, specifically qualified. Suspicious one-off's from the morgue? Not especially risky to take you on for. Happy to.” He arranges the next sentence carefully in his mind, gaze unwavering on Zayn's. “But there's only so much danger I'm willing to put you in.” 

If he expected Zayn's gaze to soften, his cruelly pretty features to melt into some semblance of understanding, he's left cold. “Y'only know me because of my propensity for  _danger_ , Liam.” 

It's. It's the first time he's heard the boy say his name, and Liam is suddenly aware of how little space remains between them where they're leaning into the center console. It hits him like dry ice expanding at the center of his ribcage, so cold it burns, the way he can pick out individual flecks of gold in Zayn's eyes from the streetlights. The shiny ink of his hair, sides growing out and top growing long. 

The precise width of his mouth.

Liam's tongue feels fat and far too heavy when he speaks. “If you can't follow the rules I've laid out, you can't play. End of.” 

This close, he can watch Zayn's nostrils flare in frustration before he pulls back abruptly and jettisons himself out of the vehicle, door slamming like a gunshot as he marches back to his flat.

Even with the noise ringing in his ears and adrenaline aggravating his blood, Liam doesn't start the engine up until he sees Zayn's made it inside.

 

The office clear outs over the hour following Liam’s return. They’re all already here overtime, their own fatigue sending them drifting out the door in ones and twos.

Well, fatigue and. 

“Kind of hard to stay motivated after a spectacle like that’s come and gone,” Horan tells Liam with a shrug. He and Tomlinson have the case documents stacked on the long work bench Liam hauled in here ages ago to aid in ‘the flow of investigative teamwork.’ 

Because  _that's_  been so effective lately.

“Not much of a spectacle,” Liam mumbles, dropping heavily into a seat beside them. “Unless you were all waiting for my head to blow up, or something.”

“Something like that,” Tomlinson mutters. A small explosive sound from Horan before the pair dissolve into giggles.

“Shut up,” Liam says, crisp. “Hand me the entomology report.”

They call it quits fairly soon after that. Liam agrees to lead a scope of one of their potential murder locations with Kloss and Delevingne the next day. Barely manages to take Loki out for a couple minutes before falling into bed, curling around his pillow and dropping into sleep as if he's been tranquilized.

He wakes up sweaty and shaky and unbelievably hard.

Fuck. Liam blindly slams a hand down until he feels the edges of his mobile on the bedside table, bringing the device up to eye level while he fumbles for the home button. The display blazes, stings his eyes. Reads  _03:27._

Liam groans, low and pained. Edges of the dream curl in the periphery of his mind, indistinct as smoke and just as potent. He breathes harshly into sudden alertness, too many sensations proving stronger than the ability to recall, but—

His eyelids flicker and he sees glimpses of it painted behind them: full lips shuddering through an exhale, dark lashes pressed to glass-cut cheekbones in release. Thin wrists glistening with the barest hint of sweat. Careful teeth tracing the fluttering pulse there. Lips sucking a bruise to the thin skin like a claim.

The exhale Liam pushes through his nose shudders out. He reaches a hand down slowly, ghosting over the hair below his navel before wrapping around his cock. He gets himself off in a few sharp tugs, bottom lip between his teeth and the ghost of someone else's moans echoing in his ears.

 

Dirty silt shifts underfoot as they walk up the riverbank, three pairs of eyes intent on three different strips of land. Flecks of glass and fragments of hypodermic needles catch the dull gray light. They don’t reveal anything of use.

“They could, though,” Kloss is saying. Her boots leave clear prints, steps precise on the damp ground. “Could have stuck them with—”

“But no indication of injection on the victims’ bodies,” Delevingne says, a monotone reminder. She’s focusing in on a particularly unsavory pile of rubbish right where the water licks the shore. “Just restraint and waiting until they passed out from blood loss. As far as anyone can tell.”

Liam feels his lip curl, that reflexive sneer whenever he thinks of their killer. Whoever in this city found it in themselves to tie nine different people down, pull them apart. Whoever relished those precise incisions and cracking bones and terrified eyes going blank underneath a haze of pain.

Because that’s what their killer does, relishes it. Savors the act of deconstruction, the grisly tableau they leave behind. Liam wonders if they tune in to the media coverage, eager to see the critical reception of their latest piece.

He wonders how often they think of him. Which one crosses the other’s mind more.

It’s not important—can’t be important—in this moment, when attention to detail is critical.

“Cara’s right,” Liam says. “We’re looking for non-serrated blades, a bone saw or as good as, or else—” he leans down, picks up something small and blue between two fingers, examining it quickly before discarding it, “—trace evidence.”

“Right,” says Kloss, squinting at what might be a wad of human hair. “Well. Not convinced our killer is dumb enough to leave actual  _murder weapons_  behind, so let's hope for that last one, yeah?” 

The air smells like whatever the factories are pumping out, damp with the morning and the river's mild reek. Between an examination of what ends up being a mangled bottle cap and skirting the remains of what was previously a gull, Liam wonders how far back he'd have to travel to see the Thames as something connected to the natural world. Four hundred years? Five?

From where they stand, Liam can still see the ugly bricks marking the shipping center where their latest body was found. It sits back from the water and behind an access road, several fences. The lab thinks the body spent some time more or less _on_ the river, though, according to the analysis of fly eggs they sent over this morning. The eggs had been a match for the maggots found in victim eight’s chest, same thalassic qualities, same air quality index inhibiting growth. Given how fresh the ninth body had been—given how hot the day had been—it couldn’t have traveled far.

Whoever is taking people apart is doing it somewhere around here.

The chatter between the DI and the Sergeants is kept to a minimum as they scour the shore. Liam has bagged all of nothing, brows heavy with annoyance and something like anxious boredom, unspent energy, when Kloss speaks again.

“How do you know that uni kid, then? Zayn.” She phrases it like it's a passing thought, but it's Liam's team for a reason; he knows how to read her interest in the length of her vowels, the twitch of her nose.

The fact that she’s asking at all.

“He's a mate,” Liam answers. “Kind of.”

Delevingne makes a crowing sort of noise Liam's tempted to label as suggestive. “Fit little thing.”

Liam isn't sure that covers it, the lethal width of Zayn's dark eyes, the magnetism of his voice, taunting and sure. He only grunts a vague agreement.

If they're his team, he's just as much theirs. “ _Oh_ ,” Kloss says. “Does Big Payno feel a bit—”

“Sergeant Kloss,” he warns. The detective keeps his eyes on the ground to illustrate how thoroughly engrossed in their current assignment he finds himself.

It's silent again for a moment until Delevingne whispers just loudly enough to carry over the sound of a ship's horn blaring in the distance, “You fancy him.”

Liam huffs out a surprised little laugh at the audacity. Says nothing.

Two hours of staring at gray expanses of dirty shore later, they find something that might hint at being useful.

“The stains could be standard weathering,” Delevingne notes. “Natural elements, you know.”

Kloss shakes her head. “When was the last time you saw plastic weather like that?”

She has a point. The long, broad sheet is torn unevenly, puckered at one edge as if it’d been pulled at by hand. It’s mottled with rust-colored splotches. The material itself—thick, like one might lay on the floor before painting—seems new, barely worn despite laying on the riverbank.

Liam tells her to bag it and begins examining the area. The sun is beating weakly through cloud cover now, air muggy as midday comes on. Had he known at age twenty just how much of homicide investigation would be picking through used condoms and sweets wrappers trapped under broken concrete gravel on the edge of London's industrial areas, he'd have reconsidered his interest.

As it is, he has a killer writing him love notes and leaving him bodies. If there’s a way back out, he’s yet to find it.

He does find something else, though.

“Delevingne,” he calls, hunched down to the ground, “over here.”

“Yessir,” she calls, easy swagger to his side and a quick drop to her knees to crouch beside him. “Oh.”

“Yep,” Liam agrees, tracing the wheel marks lightly with a gloved hand.

Delevingne grabs her mobile and opens the camera on it, snapping a few photos to get a better sense of relative length and depth. 

“About twenty centimeters width on the tread, fairly standard,” Liam mutters, registering the tap of the sergeant's fingers as she jots it down, “probably around fourteen for depth...huh.”

The marks extend for a while up the shore, fading into nothing the closer they get to the water’s edge. The Thames doesn’t rise extraordinarily in this area, too many dams and regulators to keep it from interfering with the access roads, so Liam is able to trace along the curve of the tracks as they slope.

They slope toward the water. 

“Boat,” he blurts out, electrical impulses firing off near the back of his skull, urging his feet forward.

“Pardon?” And that’s Kloss, keeping pace with him as he takes long strides to where the tracks disappear.

“They use a boat. It’s gotta be,” he manages, tongue feeling thick as he puts it together. “They commit the murders on the water.”

The fly larvae were consistent with river-breeding species because they were bred _on the river,_ somewhere close enough to victim nine’s workplace that it would be no trouble to smuggle his body back but far enough that no one would hear him when he screamed, flesh parting neatly beneath a blade, pain flooding his body.

Liam thinks of London, the wide Thames winding to its heart. Waterways filled with transport and freight and tours and slow-moving luxury cruisers. Marine restaurants. _Kayaks,_ for fuck’s sake.

What’s one among many?

“Delevingne, get a—get a few more shots of the tread, yeah?” he orders. The sergeant nods, diligent and fully professional now that something is actually _happening,_ thank God. “They must drive them down and then—but the tracks, they’re usually so...” The detective purses his lips, breath rushing out as he thinks. Then, “Kloss, I need you to find a video with area weather predictions for the last twenty-four hours.” Liam can hear the tremor of excitement in his own voice, pushes down on it until he’s got control again. “ _Specifically_ video, alright, I need to know what people _thought_ was going to happen with the weather in this area.” 

“Yes sir,” Kloss replies under her breath, latex gloves stripped off to allow her to type on her mobile.

“Okay,” Liam breathes. The day seems hotter, suddenly, his skin burning with the thrill of the image that’s coming into focus. “Right, let's head back to process what we found.”

On the ride back in, Liam hits the three on his speed dial. 

It rings only once. “Li?”

“Ni,” he returns. “Listen, we might've found something. Need you to do me a favor.”

“'Course,” Horan answers easily.

“Find me all recreational boating licenses for London,” Liam says, free hand tapping on his thigh while he watches Kloss steer back into the heavier traffic of midday Central London.

A pause. “You taking a fishing trip without me?” Horan jokes, confusion evident.

“Yeah, you know how it is. Needed some time off from this whole homicide gig, so,” Liam replies. “No, uh, we found some tread marks at the waterfront near where we found the latest vic. They veer into the water—Delevingne will pass along pictures.” He runs the nail of his index along the grain of his jeans, quick, impatient movements. “Think our killer thought it was going to rain last night, wash ‘em away.”

Horan gives a low whistle. “So Harry might have been dead-on with his maggot thing,” he surmises. “Ugh, Lou's gonna be insufferable about it.”

“We can never tell him,” Liam decides. “Also, if you could have the DNA samples from Samir Hosseini ready to go, that’d be just grand.” 

“Oh.” Horan's tone brightens. “Found some trace ev?”

“Might've done.” Scratching the bridge of his nose, Liam glances into the rear view mirror at the bag resting off to Delevingne's side. “Kloss did, anyway.”

“Give Karlie a big kiss for me,” Horan orders.

“Would,” Liam says, “wanna keep my bits intact, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Tell him he can try it himself in a minute,” says Kloss, flexing her long fingers on the steering wheel as Delevingne cackles.

“Cheers, mate,” Liam says on the breath of his own laugh, and hangs up.

They begin processing immediately upon their return, barely catching Cabello before she runs down the street to grab everyone lunch.

“Should have results on the possible blood sample tomorrow,” Liam summarizes for the gathered team when fresh crumbs of naan still dust the table. “But the marine vessel records will have to be sorted and narrowed down manually, so that's the big push right now.” They all nod—even Tomlinson, busy rubbing away a fleck of curry from the side of his mouth in the reflection of his mobile. “Alright. Get to it.”

It ends up taking the rest of the day, idle chatter while they eliminate any vessels without cabins, any that were recently repossessed. There’s still a mountain of possibilities at the end of it, but Liam feels less on-edge when Winston calls him into his office and presses for details.

“Progress, Payne.” Winston leans back in his seat, looking seconds from steepling his fingers on his desk.

Liam keeps his face neutral, lays out the work of the day with efficient sentences. Really, he _does_ hold a degree of respect for Winston—has little choice, given his role in recommending Liam for this position—but their encounters have grown borderline unpleasant since bodies started showing up with their hearts in one hand and Liam's name in the other.

There’s something almost mocking in how the Chief Inspector holds these meetings. It leaves Liam reminded of dreams where he’s stuck running in place, restless and unsettled and thoroughly helpless.

Tonight, Winston nods along and talks minimally, gaze not meeting Liam’s often enough to hold its usual dismissiveness. Possibly he's as sick of these talks as the detective is, but a quick glance at the clock reveals—

“Glad you're traveling on your own steam,” Winston says, heaving himself out of his chair in a way that makes it wheeze, “should make the rest of the night a lot easier for your crew.”

There it is. “Plans tonight, sir?” Liam asks, watching Winston assemble his belongings.

“Taking the family out for a nice dinner. Need some downtime,” the man explains. “You all have me running ragged.”

“I can imagine,” Liam replies, dry.

“Was Meredith’s idea, actually,” Winston rambles, motioning for Liam to stand as he walks toward the door of the office. “She really does take such good care of me, you know?” He squints at Liam. “You're about due for a nice, uh…bloke. Bird? Sorry,” he adds, rubbing at his eye as they stride down the corridor, “hard to keep all you homicide oddities sorted. You can imagine.” 

“Must be taxing, sir,” Liam clips out. “Certainly a bit of a strain to keep it straight.”

Winston snorts. “Or not, as the. You know. Case may be.” He pushes the door to the floor’s lobby open, ringing phones and general disgruntled conversation filtering to where they stand. He gives Liam one last look. “Do good tonight, Payne. With those...”

“...Registra—”

“Registration records, yeah,” Winston interrupts, impatience in his quick nod. “I'm off.”

“Have a good evening,” Liam says it quietly enough that the man can miss it as he power-walks to the lifts on the far side of the lobby.

Liam’s eldest sister is a big fan of cleansing breaths; he indulges in a few as he makes his way back to the investigative team’s office. The detective pushes the door open slowly, lets the familiar smells—printer ink, and the dust embedded in the ancient sofa, and the remainder of everyone’s lunch—wash over him. Then he calls out across the room, still in the doorway.

“A quick reminder, as it's Friday night and you guys work harder than probably anyone else in this department,” he says, off-handed to disguise how sincerely he means it, “if you have places you'd rather be, feel free to go there.”

Five pairs of eyes blink back at him. 

“Kloss,” he continues, uncertain in the face of their silence, “do you and Taylor have any—?”

“She's working too,” the woman responds, disbelief living at the edge of her tone. “Pretty much all weekend.”

“Right.” Liam's mouth twitches down in a consternated frown. “Cabello?”

“What, 'cause I'm the baby I have to be the slacker?” Cabello demands. “Rude.”

“Sorry.” Liam lays one hand to his opposite shoulder, pulling forward as he stretches it back. “I just—” He takes one last look at his team, buried in casework, and turns toward his own desk.

“Ben crawl up your arse?” Horan guesses a minute later, rolling clear across the room in his chair to murmur quietly.

“Do none of us have plans on a Friday night? Really?” Liam asks, furtive. “Are we—are we _losers,_ the lot of us?” 

“What can I say, you inspire dedication,” Horan simpers with a bat of his lashes. He drops it a moment later to add, “Plus, we get about three hundred percent more effective after Winston goes home for the day, you ever notice? It’s _uncanny._ ”

Liam could deny it, but, well. “He's a…perfectly decent…overseer.”

It's not even a lie. For all Liam has to exercise four different kinds of self-restraint when talking to the man, Ben Winston rose through the ranks of the London Met for a reason.

And he’d done _work,_ hadn’t he. Winston steered them through the earliest days of the investigation, the first couple of murders. Liam recalls with some ironic detachment that the man had a hell of a lot to say about how well Liam was handling it all. How quickly they were accumulating evidence. How _ready_ Liam was to lead the case, take over. Prove himself.

A suffocating amount of pressure, it had seemed. Now, Liam nearly misses it, those weeks of uncertainty. Even if they did mark the first time since his late teens that he’d done what he’d thought himself well past: let a bloke dress up demands as compliments and get away with it, push him into things he wasn’t quite prepared for.

Half a year ago, the notes had filled him with more fear than exhaustion.

It's strange to realize that he would choose the former over the latter, given the option.

Horan snorts. “ _Perfectly decent._ Incredibly diplomatic response.”

“Cheers.” Liam starts shuffling through the records on his desk, like the boat they’re after—the one people have their lives ended on—is going to present itself to him willingly. Like maybe the right paper will start glowing when he touches it.

“Niall,” Tomlinson calls, “wanna pick your brain, get over here.”

Horan makes an agreeable noise and propels himself backwards on the chair, away from where Liam is already neck deep in serial numbers and vessel descriptions.

They narrow it down substantially, only a few stacks of potential vessels ("Potential _murder boats,_ _”_ Cabello had said, grin a little wicked when the term stuck) by the end of the night. It’s no good if the boat they’re after is unregistered, but with surveillance put up in the area where the tread marks were found, it’s still something solid. Progress.

Liam stands at the door and thanks everyone as they shuffle out in a herd. He walks with Niall out to the car park, steps heavy and sure.

It's the first night in a while Liam can remember feeling satisfied with the forward momentum of the case. He wakes from a dreamless sleep nearly optimistic. Pleased with the movement of the investigation. Pleased with how he seems to be getting a grip on wanting things he can’t have.

It lasts all of three days.

“You do realize I have other priorities,” Zayn drawls through the line.

Liam rolls his eyes. “Come or don't,” he says, “but Cabello wanted you specifically.” He scowls as the sergeant wiggles her eyebrows at him. “For whatever that's worth.”

“Come pick me up,” Zayn demands.

“Busy. Take the train.” Liam hangs up, unbothered.

A thought occurs; he dials back.

“Come pick me up,” is Zayn's opener.

“Don't get into any trouble on your way here, or I'll send you back,” Liam says, and hangs up again.

Cabello still has that look on her face, eyes glimmering. They're alone in the office right now, able to make conversation across vacant desks and the long table. Horan, Delevingne and Kloss are interviewing the latest vic's relatives and coworkers. Tomlinson is who knows where—bothering Styles in the morgue, likely. Maybe in his own office.

“He on his way, then?” Cabello asks.

“Guess we'll see,” Liam says evenly, shooting a text to Lauren at the floor’s front desk to let the boy through if he shows up. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” Cabello is their youngest Detective Sergeant on the investigation, freshly twenty-two and viciously qualified.

“That face.” Liam suspects— _more_  than suspects—that Cabello uses her position as de facto little sister to run her mouth and tease without consequence. Always on the line of unprofessional. Too bright-eyed to suffer any serious reprimand.

And too vital, mind like a particularly parched sponge when it comes to criminal profiling.

She flattens her mouth into something approaching a frown, not quite managing it before an irrepressible grin is creeping back up on her. “Don't know what you could possibly be referring to, sir.”

“Ehhh,” Liam grumbles, stalking over to his own corner of the room while she gathers the photos she wants to have Zayn look over.

Cabello's request for the boy's presence had caught Liam off-guard, though he supposes it had no right to. He'd _introduced_ Zayn, after all, made it abundantly clear that the student was of use with his work on Styles' weird dementia case.

He can't exactly hide him away  _now,_ even if he wants to.

Zayn appears between one breath and the next, hovering in the doorway of the office with his customary haughty indifference.

Despite that, he seems smaller. It takes Liam a second to realize it's because he's not wearing his jacket, only a thin tee smattered in—

“What the hell did I say about starting shit on your way here?” Liam demands, shooting up from his desk. He gets in range and unthinkingly grabs at Zayn's shirt, examining the fresh red.

“Are you usually this high-strung,” Zayn wonders as the door clicks shut behind him and Liam crowds into his space, “or am I just—”

Liam anchors Zayn's jaw between his thumb and index, turning his face slightly to examine the dash of vibrant red on his dark stubble. His brow furrows. Blood doesn't—

“—special,” Zayn finishes quietly. “It's paint, by the way.”

“Yeah,” Liam says slowly. “I can see that now.” He sweeps his thumb once over the sharp line of Zayn's jaw and drops his hand to the boy’s neck, embarrassed.

Zayn stares at him, ends of his mouth barely curling. It’s all in his eyebrows, really. The full extent of his amusement. 

“Soooo,” comes a quiet voice. The both turn, Liam's hand falling away from the steady pulse at Zayn's throat. 

Cabello stands behind them, satisfaction beyond reason written all over her face. “Hello again,” she greets. She waves her hand once.

Zayn's expression flickers to neutral assessment as Liam interjects. “Zayn, this is Detective Sergeant Cabello—”

“Camila’s just fine,” she insists, still far too smug. “Thanks for stopping by. We  _really_  appreciate it.” She shoots Liam a look that he very much does  _not_  appreciate, and leads Zayn off to review her assembled case packet.

The afternoon passes like that, members of the team coming and going on their own assignments—tracking down the owners of various marine craft, most of them—while Zayn sprawls with a kind of lanky grace next to Cabello. Asks her questions about her case. Offers occasional asides. Talks low enough that she has to lean in, just a little. Just enough to have Liam leaning in too, ears straining to catch whatever is making Cabello laugh like that, low and knowing.

It's something Liam figures he should be able to tune out, the murmur of a soft voice assured of its own cleverness. He should be able to ignore the animation of Zayn's face as he tells a story that has Cabello (then later Kloss and Horan) orbiting him, feeling the warmth of his focus as he draws them all in with soft inflections and sharp eyes and a dark-burning candescence that makes Liam's _eyes_ burn when he stares too long.

He figures it shouldn't matter, seeing Zayn contextualized like this, a fever dream made real.

Liam goes home that night trying to convince himself still.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Why do you do it,” Liam asks quietly._   
>    
>  _Zayn stills. His eyes are cast down, watching water-diluted red drip into the sink from where he’d mopped it off his face and neck. “Boredom, mostly.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh here we go again! Okay, uh. This chapter is...uh. Well. I hope you like it.
> 
> Big ol' thank you to Monica for your love & patience & advice. You are much adored.
> 
> Find me on tumblr at protagonist-m, if you pleeease.

Bodies aren’t fragile. Not, at least, in the way people think. Liam knows as intimately as he knows the nauseous rupture of his own cartilage that the body is this massive ode to resiliency, lifting bruises and knitting bone and sealing flesh. Too efficient to bother with perfect stitching, unafraid to leave imprecise scars as testament to its efforts.

Their killer isn’t like that. The photos tells Liam as much. They’re not new photos, not particularly compelling or especially unique. Just detail shots close on the incisions in victim four’s chest, steady lines carving into warm red. Made distant and oddly commercial under the high gloss of the prints.

Such careful cuts. Liam wonders how they practiced. If it was a side project, separate from what occupies their days—never have the murders fallen during normal work hours—or if they’ve made a career out of their steady hands.

A doctor. A tailor. A musician. A butcher.

An artist in at least one sense.

Shadow falls over the image, the careful bisection and the shiny pinks that fill a person. Liam breathes out in a huff.

“If you’re going to hover I’m going to make you look over more cold cases,” he says, level so the shadow knows he means it.

“You’re not going to make me do anything,” the shadow tells him. It sounds certain, too. It throws itself down into a chair, trajectory sending it spinning ninety degrees before it puts down a boot and comes to a stop facing Liam, head in hand. “You could _ask,_ though. See where it gets you.”

For a bland, unimpressed second, Liam only stares. Then he turns back to the documents blanketing his desk in neat stacks. “Move over to Cara’s desk if you’re just gonna sit there. then.”

“Won’t be able to see the photos from Cara’s desk,” Zayn mumbles, leaning back in the chair. He keeps his hand on his face, cradling his chin in a way that would read as aloof if his eyes were any less bright.

After a few weeks of— _this_ , Zayn showing up to be varying levels of helpful and irritating depending on his mood, Liam can recognize the expression for what it is. “Kind of the point,” he says.

“Could tell you about them,” Zayn coaxes, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks he’s going to get anywhere with it. “Spent a fair amount of time dissecting things, it wouldn’t—”

The stack of photos slap onto the desk with a sharp crack. “Do you have a job?” Liam demands, turning to fully face the boy. “Hobbies? Do you—I dunno, tutor? Is there _anywhere at all_ you need to be?”

Zayn pauses for a second, lips pursing as he thinks. His eyes narrow a bit. Liam has a horrendous moment where he catches himself wondering if his eyelashes ever tangle. “Not sure you’d be much enthused by what else I might be doing.”

Which does give Liam a bit of pause. He rubs at the spot under his ear, considering. In the last three weeks, Zayn’s twice shown up at the station with bruises and once with his pinkie in a splint. Small enough marks that he could just be careless, if Liam didn’t know better.

It’s a little surreal to watch: in a room full of detectives, Liam’s never heard anyone ask about it. He wonders sometimes if Zayn doesn’t exist very slightly outside of reality, a small piece of something else entirely.

“If I give you an assignment,” Liam says slowly, “will you actually do it?”

Zayn hums a little noise. “Is it related to your serial murders?”

The detective swallows back frustration. “No.” At the mockingly considerate look that appears on Zayn's face, “But the alternative is me kicking you out for the day.”

And Zayn snorts, says “You’ve never once managed to get me out of here before seven,” but when Liam prints out some ancient report on a dual suicide via an inconclusive poison, the boy doesn’t complain.

 

Overall, the arrangement works. Zayn shows up at odd intervals and with little warning, does something nearly useful, irritates Liam for a spell, then fucks off again having left the team enamored to within an inch of their life.

It’s a good system. It’s predicated on a couple of rules.

The first, unstated but vividly clear: Winston can't know. It’s not much of a problem, really. Ben Winston has only a passing knowledge of what happens in the investigation and even less developed interest in it. Liam briefly worries after Zayn’s first and second forays into amateur consultation, but when the detective isn’t summarily fired or even reprimanded, he takes it for what it is.

The second rule:

“Is this your way of maintaining some illusion of control?” Zayn asks caustically from behind him.

“What illusion? I'm  _heading the case._ _”_ Liam snicks the drawer dedicated to physical investigative files shut, satisfied when he hears the lock turn over.

_“_ That's not what I meant,” Zayn says.

Liam waits a moment for him to clarify—of course he doesn't—then sighs. “We've had the acceptable level of risk talk already,” he says. “Nothing's changed.” He turns to argue the point and freezes.

“Something has,” Zayn asserts, so close Liam fancies he can feel his breath, the sway of his lashes when he blinks as if he has all day for this.

He darts a glance around, wonders at possible means of escape. Boxed up against the filing cabinet in what’s basically a repurposed broom closet with a stubborn, mouthy, _impossible_ genius of a boy taking his air—there’s not really anywhere for Liam to go.

“I know what you’re doing,” the detective manages, mouth dry. “The whole ‘big eyes, pretty smile, get what you want’ bit—it’s clever, but. It’s not  _that_ clever.”

Zayn hums, a selvage edge on silk. “You always seem so eager to forget what I can do,” he muses. It’s quiet. Doesn’t have to be loud, so close their shoes are sharing the same tile on the floor.

Liam’s tongue pushes at the backs of his teeth. “Bit grandiose of you, love.”

“Is it?” Zayn quirks a menacing brow, smiling with his lips closed. “’M a scientist, Li.”

“That doesn’t even  _rhyme_ with ‘homicide investigator,’” Liam argues, “and you figure you'll be granted—”

“No, no no,” Zayn croons, eyes dark like an abyss Liam is constantly willing himself away from, “you don’t get it.” He shifts impossibly forward, stands in the slight spread of Liam’s legs where he’s all but pinned to the file cabinet. “It means I see things you don’t. Know things you couldn’t.”

“Still not a detective,” Liam grits out.

“Know things about  _you_ that you couldn’t,” Zayn continues. “Your head is full of neurotransmitters, do you know?”

Surprised by the veering topic, Liam is left lacking a witty retort.

Zayn must take the silence as encouragement; he keeps talking. “Yeah. Acetylcholine and histamine, serotonin. Noradrenaline. That one’s responsible for all  _sorts_  of stuff, particularly in your limbic system—ups your heartrate. Dilates your pupils. Makes you scared. Makes you want to run or fight, even when you know that, logically, there’s no point and you’re already done for.”

His speech flows with that compelling certainty, the practiced syllables of an expert and the darkly twisting inflections of a poet, maybe, someone familiar with describing the texture of storms.

Zayn licks out over his lip, tipping his head forward like he’s letting Liam in on a prized secret. “Then there’s dopamine. My favorite, since you asked. Probably yours too— it’s responsible for what you might call the good stuff. Pleasure. Creativity. Infatuation.” His gaze darts down to where they’re all but pressed together, flicking back up to pierce Liam anew. “Arousal.”

The air of the tiny room is stifling, robbing Liam of his capacity for breath while he feels it just as Zayn describes—the natural high of a dopamine rush, the shivering, dizzy-dark anticipation.

_The good stuff,_ he thinks, fingers twitching at his sides with the need to dispel tension through any possible conduit.

“So when I say I see things you don’t,” Zayn finishes quietly, tone still devastatingly professional but softer than Liam’s ever heard it, “I’m not being  _clever._  I’m telling you quite truthfully, Detective Inspector, that I’m useful _because_ I can seethese things, and because I can see them, I can predict them. Cause them, even.” Something settles in his eyes, smolders. Liam just burns. “Big eyes, pretty smile, get what you want, is that how you put it?” Zayn brings his mouth to the shell of Liam’s ear, plush lips warm and buzzing when he murmurs, “Seems to work well enough, don’t you think?”

There’s no space between them and even less air, a vacuum containing only the heat of their stare when Zayn draws back.

“You keep calling me  _Detective Inspector_ like you’re taking the piss,” Liam finally manages as Zayn steps away, point apparently made, “but I’m beginning to think you just get off on saying it.”

Zayn shrugs and keeps stepping backward until he can reach behind himself and twist the knob of the door. His eyes are jack o’lantern bright when he says, “You know what else dopamine makes you?”

It’s another five minutes before Liam can will his erection down enough to walk out of the musty filing room. It’s thirty more before he can meet Zayn’s gaze without hearing the way he said the word  _impulsive_ like an accusation.

Or a warning.

 

The lights flicker on in sequence, stark with a low buzz that fills the empty office. Liam unclips Loki’s lead so he can sniff around the space before it starts filling up with people. He keeps an eye on the puppy weaving between chairs and table legs as he unzips his jacket and gets it thrown over his chair, a quiet groan rumbling out when he stretches, rubs at his neck. Usually a morning run gets him past the initial grogginess of the day, but it’s still punishingly early.

The team has the clear from Winston to begin actual investigations into possible _murder boats_ , as they've lapsed into calling them. This morning’s been set aside to narrow down the last of the potential vessels, make it a manageable list.

Liam tries not to motivate through potentially false hope, so the night before he hadn’t told the team they were possibly within weeks—days—of getting a lock on the ship, solving the case. That’s the fact of the matter, though, and the insistent excitement of it had him on his feet long before light was even a suggestion on the horizon. Nearly eager for the early start.

Which he’ll get to any second now. Liam blinks and finds his eyes grainy and too heavy to open again. Feels himself list slightly to the side where he stands.

A shrill ringtone cuts through the silence, startling him back toward wakefulness. He pries the mobile from his pocket, checking the name on the display.

The detective makes some half-voiced sound of disbelief before answering. “Why are you awake?”

“Why’re you?” Zayn responds, which, fair.

Liam scratches at his chin. “At work already. Narrowing down the—” He stops, remembering himself.

“Investigation stuff, right,” Zayn decides. “Might as well just tell me.”

Untrue, and a lazy attempt at coercion. Liam will blame the fact that it’s not quite six for the boy’s lack of finesse. “What’re you calling for.”

“You know, it’s actually perfect,” Zayn says, “I was just going to wait until you lot started showing up for the day, but you’re there already, so.”

With a sigh, Liam says, “You’re not gonna somehow sneak your way into the investigation. For the hundred-millionth time.”

“Cool,” Zayn says, dismissive, “not what I’m after.”

Liam has an argument resting on the tip of his tongue about how that’s _exactly_ what Zayn is after, but the boy keeps talking and it never makes it past his lips.

“Harry said I could use his lab,” Zayn tells him. “But he’s not awake yet. I’m about ninety percent sure.”

There’s a moment where Liam doesn’t quite know what to respond to first. “When the hell did you meet Harry?” is what he decides on.

“Uh,” Zayn intones, drawing it out, “yesterday, day before. Something. Lou wanted to, like. Show him off. I think.” His words are choppy like he’s scaling stairs, syllables bouncing with each step. “Took me to the catacomb.”

“Did he.” Of course he did. Louis and Zayn get on nearly too well these days, early misgivings traded in for medical babble and inside jokes they never elaborate on. Liam hasn’t even been able to pry explanations out of Louis when they’re tipsy and marathoning bad telly at Louis’ flat, which is how he knows the situation is bordering severe.

“Love it there,” Zayn tells him. There are city sounds filtering through the mobile, Zayn likely winding through the sparsely populated early morning streets.

Likely on his way here. “I can’t get you into Styles’ lab,” Liam says, a tad apologetic.

“Bullshit.”

“I mean it.” Liam flicks his gaze down to where Loki sits near his feet, happy and panting up at the detective expectantly. _What,_ Liam mouths to the dog. No reply, which is predictable. “I can get you _down_ there, but I don’t have keys for the morgue. You’d still have to wait for Styles to open it up for you.”

“Oh.” The fuzz of ambient noise hums pleasantly in the background, faint cadence of Zayn’s breathing somehow falling in line with Liam’s. “Well. See you in twenty.”

“Wh—” But the line is dead, and Liam lets his words die along with it.

He kills time starting in on the registration records for the remaining boats, cross-referencing them with any available GPS coordinates at the time of the last murder. It’s a little too Big Brother, Liam reckons, just how much information government agencies are privy to.

He’s still musing on it when the door clicks open and Zayn slides into the office. “Do you think the government’s overstepped the boundaries of individual privacy?”

Zayn shoots him a look. “You’re weird in the morning.” He winds the cord of his earbuds up and shoves them down into his pocket while holding a paper bag between three of his fingers. “And yes. Obviously.”

Liam nods, agreeable and still tired. “What’s in the bag?”

“Why is there a dog here,” Zayn mutters, leaning down to scratch at Loki’s ears while the puppy jumps up on him. “Uh, breakfast sandwiches. Forgot to eat before I left.”

“Loki,” Liam calls, hauling himself up from his chair and over to where Zayn’s holding his sandwich bag out of the range of Loki’s sharp little teeth. “C’mere, don’t harass him.”

Zayn lets Loki go easily. He watches the dog trot to where Liam can bend down and scoop him up, hold him to his chest. “Is this some kind of effort to make the detectives of Scotland Yard seem cuddlier?”

“You don’t think I’m cuddly?” Liam rejoins, only realizing a moment later what’s been said.

There’s derisive amusement in the curve of Zayn’s mouth, something knowing in the way he’s looking Liam over, and the detective needs a distraction. “You never actually went to bed, did you,” he says.

He’s right and he knows it. Zayn’s hair isn’t intentionally piecey, it’s simply disarrayed. His shirt is wrinkled and there are dark circles under his eyes, alert but hazy in a way that matches the croaky, all-night timbre of his voice.

Liam isn’t going to think about what that might mean.

Stretching his arm behind his head, Zayn smirks a little with his eyes squinting closed. “Never actually went _home,_ ” he admits, satisfaction settling around him like a blanket.

A small grunt is Liam’s only reply. He retreats back to his desk, eyes on the top registration record on the pile. “Feel free to kip on the couch until Harry gets in. It’ll be a while.”

Something foil-wrapped thuds on Liam’s desk. His eyes shoot up to where Zayn stands over him, hand still splayed from where he dropped the sandwich.

“Brought you breakfast,” Zayn drawls. “Figured you hadn’t eaten.”

Liam is already picking at the foil. “And how’d you figure that.”

“I called you at half five and you were already at the station,” Zayn says, slow, like the logic is obvious. “Clearly not living your. Y’know. Best life.”

Liam scowls a little around a bite of the sandwich. It’s good. Eggy. “Is that what you were up to all night, then?” he prods. “Living your ‘best life’?”

Zayn just flutters his lashes, spilling down into a chair and tearing into the foil of his own sandwich. “Never did tell me why your dog is here.”

“Loki, yeah,” Liam mumbles around another bite. “Uh, just gonna be a long day. Didn’t want to leave him alone like that.”

Ears perked at his mention, Loki paces back and forth between the pair. He's trying to determine which of them will most readily give up a bite of their breakfast.

It won’t be Liam. “It’s not good for you, baby,” he says in a cooing undertone, scratching at the puppy’s chin as he passes.

It’s quiet for a minute. In and of itself, this is suspicious, and when Liam looks up the notion is confirmed by the narrow look on Zayn’s face.

“Yes?” Liam asks, remainder of his sandwich halfway to his mouth.

“You’re plenty cuddly,” Zayn informs him.

The way he says it, it sounds like an accusation. Liam hides his grin in another bite of breakfast.

 

Blood drips onto the tile, finding some small puddle of water and bleeding into the lines of the tile’s grit. Liam moves his feet back from the encroaching red, cocks a hip against the wall.

“Was he tall?” he hazards. “Short? Fat, skinny, blue eyes, brown.”

“Don’t remember.” Zayn’s voice is a little clogged by the pressure he’s placing on his nose.

Stemming the flow of blood. Liam could scream, honestly. “You remember,” he says, hard syllables echoing around the walls of the tiny washroom, “you just don’t want to tell me.”

“Oh, he’s a clever one,” Zayn murmurs to his reflection. There’s a scrape along his cheek that’ll need attention. Bruising on his knuckles.

“Zayn.” Liam’s got his arms folded tight, fists buried in the crooks to keep him from dabbing at the blood drying on the boy’s face.

Zayn flicks the faucet on, speaks over the sound. “You’re getting twisted up over nothing. You know? Not like they broke anything.”

“ _They?_ ” Liam drops his arms, hands itching with the urge for action. He needs to hit something. He needs to bandage Zayn up.

Wiping at the red on his chin with the hand not occupied pinching his nose, Zayn only shrugs. Doesn’t elaborate.

The detective catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. The image it frames shows a contrast in posture, Liam’s stance rigid while Zayn’s remains smooth under the harsh light mounted atop the mirror. It casts the boy in its glow, some cinematic cue denoting importance.

“Why do you do it,” Liam asks quietly.

Zayn stills. His eyes are cast down, watching water-diluted red drip into the sink from where he’d mopped it off his face and neck. Then he looks up, gaze unerring when it meets Liam’s in the mirror. “Boredom, mostly,” he says, like it’s simple.

Implicit blame burns in Liam’s sternum. He drops his head back against the tiled wall, still holding Zayn’s stare. “Is this about the investigation?” he hazards. “Blackmailing me with your physical wellbeing?”

The blood’s stopped flowing from Zayn’s nose. He’s almost cleaned up, actually, aside from the bruises and scrapes he could do nothing to disguise even if he wanted to. The boy flexes his hand once. Stares down at the purpling skin of his knuckles, impassive.

After a long moment, he speaks. “It wouldn’t be blackmail if you didn’t give a shit.”

Liam swallows a protest. It’d ring hollow anyway. “Should start taking lessons from you, then,” he says.

Zayn smiles a little, easy and light. “Your mates are waiting for you,” he reminds the detective.

They are. It’s not the first time Zayn’s shown up at the pub like this, bruised and a little bloody, but it’s the most severe by far. Liam hadn’t even given the lads a chance to comment before he was up and hauling Zayn to the toilets, demanding to know how the hell he’d found trouble at six on a Wednesday.

“You’re gonna want to bandage those,” Liam tells him, raising his own hand to indicate.

“I’ll do it back at the Yard.” A last glance to make sure he’s eliminated any wayward flecks of blood. Zayn turns from to the door.

Liam follows him out, grabbing the edge when Zayn fails to hold it open for him. “You’re mental if you think you’re coming back to the station after that.”

Zayn heads toward the bar with a smirk Liam feels more than sees. “And you’re gonna let me, so what does _that_ say.”

Scowling, Liam works his way back to the booth where Louis and Harry and Niall wait. Their expressions smooth out when Liam gives them a small thumbs up.

They don’t ask about the bruised knuckles, the scraped cheek. They’re small details, Liam supposes. Easily swept away in the flow of Zayn’s speech, washed out by the glow of his eyes. Obscured by that bright laughter which drowns all shadow.

 

This is perhaps the dumbest argument Liam’s ever had. “Why should _I_ do it? I’m already the one driving him home.”

“And that’s why you should do it,” Louis counters. He pats at his pockets for the essentials, his wallet and his mobile and his keys. The sleeves of his jacket are a little long, hanging down to his knuckles. “C’mon, birds, stones, you know how it goes.”

Liam gives a low groan, knowing he’s lost. “He’s gonna spend the next half hour torturing me.”

Louis only smiles and hitches his bag higher on his shoulder. “Yeah.”

The pathologist is clicking open the door to the office when Liam finally gets it up to just _do it._

His trainers squeak against the tile as he inches toward the couch, the prone form there.

“Zayn,” he tries softly. The boy’s curled with his face to the backing cushion, collar of his leather jacket messy and obscuring his mouth. It’s probably a little open. He’s probably drooling.

Liam really, really doesn’t want to wake him up.

“Zayn,” he tries again anyway. “Zed, hey.” He deliberates for a moment, uncertain with his hand hovering close enough to feel the warmth radiating off the boy. Then he risks it, gives the soft exposed skin just under Zayn’s jaw a gentle prod to rouse him.

He sleeps like the dead, though. Liam isn’t entirely sure how it was he ended up staying so late tonight. The boy had been working through a stack of ancient case files—old, old stuff, stuff the department had run out of steam or time or funding on years ago—and frankly smashing it, so engrossed over in their little makeshift office lounge that Liam hadn’t had the need or desire to tell him to get his stuff together because he should probably take him home. The boy had been so uncharacteristically _still_ that Liam had let it slip all night, unwilling to break the spell.

Only now Liam himself is headed out, he and Tomlinson the only team members left in the building—they’re ready to start investigations into individual boats, finally, can start tomorrow—and the spell is going to break anyway.

Zayn doesn’t actually work here. This is—a lark, mostly, something positive they can report on to Winston, omitting the particulars he never bothers to ask for.

This isn’t Zayn’s world the way it’s Liam’s, no matter how intent he is. No matter how adept.

He's still a civilian.

The boy snuffles a little into the weave of the upholstery, nose twitching.

Liam leans over the couch. Puts his fingers back on the give of flesh under Zayn’s jaw. “Zayn,” he tries again, tone gentling more than he cares to notice. “C’mon, time to be a person again. Yeah? Up.”

It’s late. He really shouldn’t be touching Zayn like this. When he drags his hand away from the boy’s skin—sleep-warm and soft enough that he wonders if it’s lotion, if that’s where that smell like lavender is coming from—his fingers slide up past the angle of his jawbone, the hollow plane of his cheek.

Zayn’s eyes flutter open. Liam lifts his hand up and away, tucking it into the palm of the other behind his back. The boy shifts until he’s on his back, staring up at Liam with hazy comprehension.

“Time to go,” Liam says. His voice is quiet enough for the crack in it to be perceived as exhaustion.

It is, he reasons. Of a sort.

There’s a long moment where Zayn stares up at him with no definite indicators he’s heard or comprehended. They stay locked in it, and it’s heavy in a way Liam doesn’t want to understand.

Really, Tomlinson should have been the one to wake him up.

“Okay,” Zayn says, too tired to be anything but pliant. He pushes himself up from the sofa, torso twisting as he gets turned around.

The detective steps away, tearing at the gauzy moment until it disintegrates. Zayn sits up, now, moves languidly. Gets his bearings and finds Liam where he’s moved to stand by the door.

The boy rubs at his mouth, blinks huge, inky eyes.  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” he asks, leveraging himself up off the couch onto unsteady feet.

Liam bites at the inside of his cheek to keep from saying anything.

 

The slam of the car door booms like a cannon. Liam barely hears it, boots pounding on the cracked paving as he rounds the corner to where Horan stands at the end of the pier.

It’s too late, of course. It was probably too late when Horan called twenty minutes ago, rough and breathless and telling Liam to get his arse down to the wharf they’d finally, painstakingly tracked an abandoned boat to.

_The_ abandoned boat. A small fishing vessel that had appeared three days previous, according to their contact at the Port, marked for removal the next day. Even if their team hadn’t gotten a lock on it today, someone would have called them tomorrow, told them about the stains like a flood of rust on its interior. The tools, if there were any.

Too easy a solution, apparently. Too much progress to hope for.

Liam calls his fellow DI’s name, watching the way uneven orange light flickers on his face, his glassy eyes.

He reaches the man’s side, breath choppy, turning to face the spectacle of the boat where it’s turning black as it burns and burns and burns in the water. Light dances, plays off each splash of immolated hull that falls to the current, painfully bright against the first shadows of evening.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Liam breathes, listening to the crackle of flame and the groaning of overheated metal.

From his peripheral, he sees Horan nod. “They knew,” he says, tone raspy, and Liam wonders how much smoke he’s inhaled standing here. “They fuckin’ knew we were looking.”

“How?” The fishing boat looks cheap as it burns, all insubstantial metal melting in on itself like a tin can in a campfire, crumbling to jagged planes of ash.

Taking their best lead with it.

“Guess that’s the question of the hour,” Horan decides, tone hollow. “It’s—fuck, Payno, I. By the time I got down here. It’d already burnt through the interior. I’m sorry.”

Liam shakes his head, dismissing the apology even as his stomach twists bitterly. “We’ll have the arson team look it—shit—look it over. If they knew we were onto them, they knew to start it from the inside.” There’s something with heavy claws settling in Liam’s chest, digging into the soft flesh it finds. It scrapes at him like panic, catches on something flinty. Sets his insides to smolder.

It’s a feelingjust this side of dangerously flammable.

Horan grunts his understanding, frozen where he watches the flames dance. They stand like that for a moment more until the fireboat’s siren can be heard, a trawler’s heavy engine somewhere behind it. They watch at the end of the pier as the boat— _mounds_ of potential evidence—is doused. It smokes pathetically, blackened metal shell still radiating heat they can feel the edges of at the end of the pier.

Liam watches Horan debrief with the fire crew on his radio for a moment before his throat starts to burn with the urge to scream. He dismisses himself for a cigarette by the dirty river’s edge.

One cigarette becomes two. When he lights the third—gaze hateful on the small, tenacious flame of his lighter—he’s stopped shaking with something anxious and ugly the way rage is.

Liam just watched what was very possibly the best evidence trail they were going to get  _burn up._ Objectively, it’s not as bad as it could be—they have the fishing boat’s shell, don’t they, and arson leaves its own set of soot-smudged fingerprints. But after the DNA from the latest vic in the serial murders was matched to the dingy, rust-colored stains on the plastic sheeting they unearthed, after a lead was found on an unclaimed vessel fitting their predicted description,Liam had started to see an end to this thing. A substantial set of missteps by their murderer that would land them in a cell.

Which was foolish. It’s always foolish, holding any but the bitterest of hopes for an open investigation of this scale. It was foolish thinking a killer who’s proven themselves enigmatic and knowledgeable of their team, their methods, would ever be anything but a step ahead of them.

When they make it back to the station, Liam shakes his head at his team with thin lips and leaves Horan to explain, retreating to the file closet to retrieve the case info. There’s nothing left to do but review what they have,  _again,_ even if the thought makes him want to burn something down himself.

Only.

“No,” he breathes, flipping through the files with practiced motions. His voice reverberates against the airless room, the darkness of the space. “ _No_ fucking way.”

It’s foolish, Liam knows—he  _knows—_ to allow a civilian access to private records. Foolish to trust for even a moment that they won’t take advantage.

The incendiary feeling in his chest blooms into flame, choking him with a furious smoke that crawls up his throat, twists his expression hatefully. Sends him flying out the station door.

In an apparently long list of mistakes involving Zayn Malik, memorizing his address isn’t one of them. Even if the boy hadn’t talked Liam into giving him rides to and from the station at least twice a week for a month now, Liam would have the number of his flat committed to heart. When he’s not being honest with himself, he sees it as a habit of the job.

He’s never actually stepped foot inside Zayn’s building, though, always content to let the sloe-spirited boy shuffle to his cruiser with paint-stained shirts and disheveled hair and a smile that only sometimes reaches his enormous, haunting eyes.

It turns out the number isn’t on the door so much as right next to it, a fresh gold-hued plate also housing a doorbell. Liam ignores it completely.

“ _Malik!_ ” he shouts, pounding at the door with a heavy fist. “Zayn Javadd Malik, open your  _fucking_ door!”

It just—clicks open without incident, as if Liam had been politely knocking instead of shouting into the empty hall, rattling the lights in their long overhead casings. Zayn stands there, unperturbed and infuriatingly unrepentant, even as he murmurs, “Finally noticed, then, Detective?”

Liam shoves his way through the door, hand on the edge of it to keep Zayn from slamming it on him. He doesn’t, though, doesn’t even attempt to close it, just walks steadily, silently backward—feet clad only in mismatched socks, which figures—keeping a regular distance between his own relaxed, slinking grace, and Liam’s heavy tread.

The DI feels anger shoot through his tendons, burn in his fingertips. “Give me the file. Now.” When Zayn only blinks in that sleepy, unimpressed way of his, Liam feels rage like white light in his spinal cord. “ _Now,_ Zayn!” he bellows, decibels ringing in the flat.

Zayn doesn’t give him the file. Certifiably a genius, maybe, but probably the only person Liam’s ever met with absolutely no survival instinct to speak of, so  _of course_ he doesn’t, instead continuing to pad softly backwards into his tiny kitchen, a smudge of dark and uncaring in the sterile space.

“Y’want anything to drink?” Zayn asks conversationally, splaying his hands behind him on the countertop. His narrow shoulders are relaxed as they curve back.

Liam suspects more than usual, even, that the boy before him might be unhinged. “Do you have any concept,” he begins, grave, “of what kind of sentencing follows stealing police records? It’s a  _felony,_ Zayn.”

“No need for thank you’s, I was about to put the kettle on anyway,” Zayn returns, going through the motions of setting water to boil.

His posture is easy and loose, frame softly angular under a well-fit tee and trousers the color of charcoal, but turning his back is a mistake. He must know it, too, with the way he twitches just slightly as Liam paces forward to stand behind him, close enough to feel the tension crackle through his frame before he forces himself into easiness once again.

Liam palms the back of Zayn’s neck to still him, large hand covering a tattoo barely visible below his shirt. His skin is so hot there, just under the nape of black hair growing unruly. When Liam squeezes slightly, he can feel Zayn’s hammering pulse.

“When’d you take it,” he says quietly, purposefully, “and how.”

Zayn is frozen, hands stilled at different heights above the counter while Liam holds him in place with one hand. Liam can only see half his face when it’s turned like this, can only watch the flutter of one set of lashes as Zayn shudders an exhale.

He’s so self-satisfied that it’s nearly  _obscene_  when he breathes, “Ages ago. Nicked your key when you were too flushed and busy trying to figure out how to put some distance between us to notice.” His eyes flash dark when he adds, “It was  _easy_.”

That little confrontation in the file room. Liam breathes hotly through his nose, eyes twitching shut as he squeezes a bit more on Zayn’s neck. His other hand twitches a little, some hateful, primordial instinct toward violence flooding him as the adrenaline does.

His next exhale shudders. “Do you know how dangerous what you’re doing is.”

Zayn’s draws in his own ragged breath. “Do  _you?_ _”_

And Liam—Liam isn’t acting with conscious thought, anymore. Liam is consumed by fire and something copper—something intoxicating and heady. Something with  _teeth._

His own teeth dig into the back of Zayn’s neck where his hand was only a moment before, sharp and punishing on the nub of bone under sable skin. Both hands are pushing around to Zayn’s front, digging into his hips hard enough to leave bruises there, too, a match for the mark he’s making just above the back of the boy’s collar.

Zayn’s laugh is a dark, strangled sound as he allows himself to be maneuvered around, pushed back into the countertop. Onto it.

Liam chains together bruises like posies from the dip of Zayn’s shirt and his sharp sharp sharp collarbones to the cruel line of his jaw, only attacking his mouth when he’s cupping his face with insistent fingers. He licks once over the seam of the boy’s plush lips before biting his way past them, tongue tracing Zayn’s molars like he can figure him out any better from the inside.

Maybe he can. Zayn yields to it in a way Liam’s never seen him yield to  _anything,_ spread legs cradling Liam’s hips, torso arched into his in a wicked curve. Liam sucks hard on his tongue, one hand drifting back to pull at his hair, and Zayn actually moans, breathy and higher than Liam thought to imagine.

Because he did imagine. No use denying it, now that he has the most excruciatingly attractive person in the world caught by the waist, full lips too busy moving against Liam’s to whisper any more riddles that he’ll have to sort through like a tangle of barbed wire. No use in not letting it consume him, burn him from the inside.

He moves Zayn with an arm around his back, gratified when he wraps his legs around Liam’s waist so that no space cools the air between them as Liam stumbles half-blind through the small flat. They make it as far as the opposite living room wall before Liam is pinning Zayn up against that, too, one hand bracing him while the other rucks his shirt up. He feels the rasp of the cotton against his knuckles as he runs a thumb over one of Zayn’s nipples, satisfied when it starts to harden and he squirms in Liam’s grip.

“This proper procedure, then?” Zayn asks between demanding kisses, voice nearly liquid when it pours into Liam’s ears, saturates his bones. “Use this interrogation technique oft—” Liam rolls the other nipple between deft fingers, watches Zayn’s mouth work uselessly as his voice dies.

His face breaks beautifully with it, expression falling open as his head drops back against the pale wall. It exposes the long line of his throat, littered on one side with a line of bruises Liam put there, ruined red against the vulnerable skin.

Something clenches in Liam’s chest. He pushes Zayn further up the wall, bringing his lips to the boy’s ear.

“Never,” he admits quietly, hot breath on the delicate shell, “never met a person who could get under my skin like you.”

Another one of those throaty laughs, right into Liam’s neck, his jumping pulse. “Gonna spend all night under your skin.”

It prickles up and down Liam’s spine, twisting the heat in his belly back from a simmer of want to something feral. He snarls out a groan, nipping once at Zayn’s jaw before moving their mouths together, stealing his oxygen before whispering, “Bed, Zayn. Where.”

Zayn doesn’t even break their next kiss to cast a hand back and find the lip of what’s presumably his bedroom doorway. He wraps delicate fingers around the edge of it, pulling backward as Liam follows with Zayn still in his arms.

Liam faintly registers the sound of his boots on the hardwood as he steps across the threshold and the high windows letting a spill of city light into the room. He vaguely notes the ample size of the cushy, pallid duvet and the bed beneath it. Mostly, though, he registers the sound Zayn makes when he tosses him down, breathy and surprised as he bounces slightly with the impact and the stain of pink on his high cheekbones. The way the natural light turns his eyes to molten gold. The line of his darkly-clad body, propped up on his elbows with a knee cocked like he’s waiting for something.

Liam toes off his boots and moves to hover over him, crawling between his legs as he goes. He grinds down in one long roll of his body, watching Zayn’s head tip back and his hands fall from where they’re clenching in Liam’s shirt down to the mattress, wrists limp and palms up.

It’s as good an invitation as any. Liam laces his fingers through Zayn’s, pulling his arms up above his head to where he can tuck both his slim wrists into the circle of his larger fingers. His other hand falls to push the boy’s shirt up, exposing dark skin flushed with arousal and a mess of ink that Liam dazedly realizes he didn’t think to expect. He traces it with his tongue anyway.

Liam dips his head to get at the words etched on Zayn’s hip, grinning at the chafe of denim against his chin when Zayn grinds helplessly up with the action, still pinned by one of Liam’s hands.

When he looks up from under his lashes, Zayn is worrying at his bottom lip, biting at it until it’s swollen and deep red. His expression is pinched like he’ll die if he doesn’t get some relief.

“Gonna decapitate you if you don’t get in me soon,” Zayn mutters, squirming in Liam’s hold. “Run tests on your brainstem to figure out why you’re such a bloody _tease_.”

Liam rumbles a laugh, feeling his cock twitch with the poorly-disguised desperation in Zayn’s tone. “You’ve a weird approach to foreplay.”

Zayn doesn’t acknowledge him, allowing Liam to strip his shirt off before he flips onto his belly and contorts to reach his nightstand. Liam runs a rough palm over the smooth skin of his lower back, watching a trail of goosebumps appear in its wake. Zayn all but chucks the small bottle at Liam when he finds it, wiggling out of his socks and trousers as fast as the strain of his dick in loose boxers will allow.

Swallowing against a rush of saliva, Liam discards his own shirt before bending down, mouthing along the line of Zayn’s cock through the fabric. His lips squeeze once around the crown before he hooks fingers under the waistband of Zayn’s pants and pulls.

If Zayn is uncomfortable being completely naked with someone else still half-dressed and kneeling above him, eyes heavy on every darkly luminous inch of his skin, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he smirks and wraps a hand around his length, stroking slowly as he plants his feet on the bed and lets his other hand drift from his nipples to his navel to—

“Let me,” Liam rushes out, reaching for the lube and batting Zayn’s wandering hand away from the cleft of his arse. “Let—”

“Yeah,” Zayn breathes, spreading his legs further and throwing one lazy arm above his head.

Liam doesn’t waste a lot of time on slicking up his fingers, still feeling his synapses spark like firecrackers. The push in is easy. Zayn is unapologetically indecent with it, grinding down onto Liam’s fingers, panting and all but demanding two more, demanding Liam’s cock after only moments the way a sovereign would demand tribute.

Not the worst comparison. Liam slides out of his trousers and pants all at once, moving fluidly up Zayn’s body until he can tip his chin up with one hand and pin his knee to his chest with the other.

“Condom,” he prompts, kissing Zayn with a little bit of bite before he lets him respond.

Zayn groans. “God you’re boring. Fine, give me a—second.”

Leaning back into a kneel, Liam feels something a little unsettling unfurl in his stomach. Zayn turns around to fish a condom out of the same nightstand as before, arse on display, and—

“Zayn,” Liam says quietly, hand not sticky with traces of lube wrapping around the boy’s ankle.

Head craning back over his shoulder, Zayn huffs. “What, Liam.” He says it like  _Lee-yum,_ drawn out and soft.

The man is quiet for a moment before he shakes his head. “Never mind. I—never mind.”

“Mmm.” Zayn finally finds what he’s looking for, flicking the condom over to Liam so that he can go back to sprawling on his back. His expression is cross, still, but it’s softened by lust and,  _maybe,_ dancing at the corners of his eyes and edges of his mouth, something sweeter.

It’s a mild irritant—another riddle—and it calls to mind the constant thrum of push-pull tension between them. Why they’re here in the first place, naked and all over each other.

It stokes the flames licking under Liam’s skin, a gauzy version of the fury that had him biting into Zayn’s flesh like he wanted to consume him minutes ago.

He still does. “Could really make it a problem for you, filching police evidence,” he informs the boy conversationally, bringing his knee back up to his chest and lowering his hips into the spread of his thighs. “Press charges. Wouldn’t take them a minute to convict you.”

“Yeah,” Zayn breathes, “Not gonna do that, though.” He butterflies his unbent leg to hook the heel of his foot in the back of Liam’s knee, keep them touching at every point. “Gonna fuck me instead, right.”

“Mm, shouldn’t,” Liam murmurs into his mouth, the words reverberating from his lips to Zayn’s when they ghost a kiss. “Should lock you up. Put you away.”

“Keep me where you can always find me?” Zayn taunts, voice honey while his eyelashes flutter at the press of Liam’s cock, the suggestion of it at his entrance. “Always so worried I’m gonna slip away, aren’t you? Like smoke.” Quieter, breathier, “Like one of your evil fucking cigarettes.”

Liam could tell him that, clearly, he has a few dangerous vices of his own, but instead he groans low in his throat and pushes forward, one hand helping to guide him into the tight clench of Zayn’s body.

It’s fucking unfair, how beautiful Zayn is. His full bottom lip pouts out like he resents the pleasure tightening his brow, fluttering his eyelashes as he takes Liam in inch by inch. But his mouth is open and languid when Liam moves his own over it, pliant and ripe like the skin of a black currant.

Fucking delicious. On the subject of vice, Liam didn’t realize he could become so instantly addicted to the taste at the roof of someone else’s mouth, the slide of their tongue or the ridged pearl texture of their teeth. The exact sounds punched out from their larynx when he moves slow and deliberate inside them. The give of the flesh at their hips when he digs his fingers in.

“Not going anywhere,” Liam tells him, speeding his thrusts once he’s estimated Zayn’s been given ample time to adjust to the size of him. “Don’t have to lock you up to keep you around.” It’s true. For all his disaffected boredom, Zayn lurks in the team’s office even when there’s no explicable reason for him to be there, giving opinions on smaller cases with forced casualness, even as his eyes flicker with intensity over the subject and gleam when he’s right.

Liam has him pegged: it’s Zayn’s  _element,_ those dark puzzles _._ That endless praise.

The boy buries one hand in the short strands of hair at the back of Liam head, nails digging in in a way that sends electricity sparking all the way down Liam’s spine to his groin. “Might want to anyway,” he pants out, cadence matched to the thrust of Liam’s hips. “Tie me down, make me yours? You seem the type.”

They shouldn’t have Liam shivering with arousal, those words. They shouldn’t have him fighting back the first tremors of orgasm with his own lip between his teeth, hips snapping hard enough to knock Zayn up the bed a bit, hair a messy raven halo above his shining brow. His eyes are mostly pupil, want so vivid it burns.

Leaning down on one forearm, Liam takes Zayn’s cock in his other hand and pulls with solid, fast strokes. When Zayn throws his head back, he bites at the boy’s throat some more, sucking hard on the salt-sweaty skin until he hears Zayn let out what’s nearly a whine.

As close as Zayn will ever let himself get to begging, probably.

He pulls back only slightly from the newly ruined flesh. “That what you were thinking about?” he breathes raggedly into Zayn’s neck. “When you crowded up into me in that filing closet? Wanted that case report, sure, but I bet—” he laughs a little, euphoric and slightly mad with the rush of it, the potent rub of it against his still-seething rage, “—I just  _bet,_ Zayn, that you wanted this too.” He slams home, registering the blinding bliss on Zayn’s face that tells him he hit his mark. “Wanted me to hold you against the door and not let you move an inch ‘til you were stuffed with my cock, right?”

Zayn’s only response is a garbled noise, not quite a yes but close enough to have heat pulsing at the bottom of Liam’s spine. “Wanted that too,” Liam says. “Always fucking want you.”

And the admission isn’t really meant for Zayn, but it has him choking out a sweet, exquisitely high sound and coming, body tight on Liam’s, eyes slipping closed with the force of it.

“Knew it,” Zayn breathes, still riding the aftershocks, still milking Liam’s cock. He grins, lazy and sharp all at once.

Later, Liam will wonder if it’s the self-satisfaction rolling off Zayn’s bruise-stained body that tips him over the edge, or the black ice glitter of his eyes when he looks up at him. The sincerity of the pleasure in the dark irises.

In the moment, it doesn’t matter. Liam comes hard, world going black at the edges as he pulses into the condom, staying in the tight clench of Zayn’s yielding body until he feels less like he’s had the air punched out of him.

Zayn is curled up under the white duvet when Liam shuffles back from the loo, where he’d disposed of the condom and taken a moment to stare accusingly into the mirror. Wiped the sweat off his brow. Pieced his brain back together.

It worked well enough for him to have taken in the stark cleanliness of the small space, tile and sink and shower all as pale and immaculate as the rest of the flat.

Now that he’s not busy trying to fuck the arrogance out of Zayn, he notices a lot of little things about his bedroom. Shelf after artfully-spaced shelf of books, some thick and medical, some mere slivers of unknown work titled in scrawling font. A game cartridge that looks about thirty years old. An uneven line of spray paints arranged from dark to light on a low dresser that also hosts a dish of jewelry and four separate pairs of scissors.

Notably, there’s what might be a cat skull housing a tiny potted plant on the sill, small leaves a burnished green in the meager light from the street.

“Whenever you’re done being creepy and staring at all my stuff,” Zayn mutters, eyes closed, “you should come keep me warm.”

Liam pads forward and crawls under the covers, unaffected by Zayn’s demanding tone after hearing it for a month straight at the station and then every night in his brain. “No one with a living thing’s skull in their bedroom can accuse another person of being creepy,” he says. He feels sleepy and sated, would want to curl this prickly specter of a boy into his chest even if he hadn’t been all but ordered to.

So he does, brings his arm around Zayn and slides him forward until his forehead is pressed to Liam’s clavicle.

“You don’t know that’s a real skull,” Zayn mumbles sleepily. His lips feel sticky and hot and perfect against Liam’s bare chest, breath ghosting out in warm puffs as it evens out.

“I work homicide,” Liam murmurs, quiet, “I know bone.” He lays an easy hand to the back of Zayn’s neck, tracing where the skin must be purpling from the way he ravaged it earlier. Liam thinks of all the times he’s seen Zayn marked up—alleys and pubs and when he strides into the station, dark eyes unrepentant when they meet Liam’s across the room. When he falls into the police car, languid and with his hair smelling of sex, daring Liam to ask the question burning on the tip of his tongue.

And now, eyelashes fanned across his cheeks while he nuzzles into Liam’s body, hands limp between their bare chests.

“You’re right,” Zayn breathes out on a sweet sigh.

“Hm?” Liam grunts, soft with the way he’s beginning to doze himself.

“The skull,” Zayn replies. “It’s real.” He burrows deeper into Liam’s hold.

Something like a cold finger traces Liam’s spine before he laughs, a single exhale out. “You’re so fucking weird.”

The only response is the sound of Zayn’s breathing.

 

Moonlight pierces Liam’s sleep like a silver needle through the eye. He frowns, trying to twist away from it before he realizes this tangle of sheets isn’t his own. The insistent warmth he feels is more than the weight of sleep—it’s another person,pressed into him with their leg hitched around his waist.

It’s telling, probably, that he figures out it’s Zayn from the way he smells. Warm, and a bit like his leather jacket, and the undertone of something woody from faded cologne, and something nearly lavender, too, but sharper on the end like sweat is.

Liam breathes into the boy’s hair for a moment before he carefully extricates himself from their tangled pile of limbs. He moves as soundlessly as he can to the small bathroom, snagging his boxers off the cool wood floor as he goes.

After he washes his hands, he splashes his face once with cold water, willing himself awake. Still bleary, Liam wonders what time it is, and if anyone has called him, and whether Zayn will be up for another round when he wakes up.

He peeks out into the kitchen to find one of those answers, noting on the microwave’s digital clock that it’s just past midnight.

Liam is still deliberating on whether to wake Zayn up or not when his eyes catch on a doorway left barely open. Its contents are partially lit by the same treacherous moonlight that stung his eye, busy patterns just out of place enough to arouse his curiosity.

Slinking through the flat, Liam presses tentative fingers to the lip of the doorway. He ducks his head into the room, barely nudging the door to allow access.

The room is filled with blood.

No, Liam thinks over instinctive alarm, that’s—wrong. He squints against the silvering effect of the moonlight until the wan colors start to make sense.

Every wall is covered in canvases, different shapes and in different states of undress. Some are hung, while larger ones rest on the floor at an angle.

Nearly all of them are drenched in deeply colored paint.

And the overall effect seems to be one of dripping, Liam will admit. Splattering, in some places. Smearing.  _Abstract._

The stark lighting makes the patterns in them harder to pick out, but Liam’s whole life is observation, and they’re there. Shapes that swoop and divot, made with tools Liam can’t even guess at. They suggest movement or stationary, solid intent, based on the thickness of the paint they’re sculpted into. There’s one that’s highly textured with a singularly smooth center that calls to mind the drop of blood on the end of a pin, another that unsettles him with the way it builds and builds and builds its base acrylics—They’re acrylics, right? Or oils?—into a jagged edge at the top of the canvas, subverting what’s naturally pleasing to the eye.

Liam’s gaze wanders to the easel near the back of the room, frame visible through the harsh punctures of the canvas resting on it. And the canvas truly does look bloody, layered, perhaps, with fabric of some sort to give the impression of visceral tearing where each gaping hole has been made. Liam squints, analyzes it with an eye befitting his occupation.

If it were a body, a human body, he’d say the victim had been repeatedly stabbed with a vicious, down-dragging momentum. Not perfunctory— _personal._ Achingly so.

A crime of passion.

Clouds shift or Liam’s perception does; either way, the room seems darker. Liam feels suddenly dirty, invading a space he’s not been expressly given access to, something clearly private.

Something enthralling, sure, but not freely given. Liam has no right to take this, the knowledge of this room and these paintings, even if he’d gladly listen to Zayn explain for however long it took.

That thought, more than any other, is what unbalances him enough to have him tip-toeing back across the hardwood and into the boy’s bedroom, under the covers where Zayn is still curled toward Liam’s phantom warmth.

He rouses, barely, when Liam slips his arm back around him. “Li?” he rasps thickly.

Liam shushes him, petting at his hair until Zayn throws a possessive leg back over his hip and nestles into him.

It takes sleep a while to find Liam, this time.

 

Three days pass before anyone says anything.

Liam is working through the grudging process of catching Zayn up on half a year’s investigative material—what he doesn’t already know, what he hasn’t admitted to gleaning from the stolen file, interest practically glowing around him—while the team shoots them looks and Liam tries not to touch Zayn more than is absolutely necessary.

Which, some would argue there’s not  _ever_ a reason to touch your mate’s neck, rub your thumb into the fading bruises there. Some might even insist placing two fingers in the crook of your pal’s wrist as they scribble a quick note is far too intimate a gesture for a workspace. Wholly needless.

But those people would also probably not generally attempt to argue that to their investigation lead’s face, so Liam figures Tomlinson must be special.

“Tell me,” Louis insists. Liam and he are hovering near the kitchenette setup of the office, Louis playing at brewing water for tea while Liam digs through the mini-fridge for something edible.

“Tell you what,” Liam replies, flat.

“Don’t be  _shitty,_ ” Louis hisses, humor lighting his eyes. “Christ, we’ve all been taking bets for a month on whether you’d bend him over or break him in half first, now  _tell me_ how right I was.”

Liam considers it, the marks he’d dug into Zayn’s skin the other night, the answering welts in his own back from the morning after. The soft trace of his mouth over every inch of purpling skin on Zayn’s body in the shower that followed. “Bit of both.”

A low whistle. “Niall and Cara owe me money.”

Liam snorts a laugh into the bowels of the fridge. “We’re not talking about it.”

“Shit,” Louis mutters, “just a one-off, then?”

Pausing, Liam considers that. “Go do your job,” he finally says. The door of the fridge shuts with the sound of dry suction.

He belatedly thinks to grab Louis by the forearm and haul him back a step to murmur, “This isn’t going to be a topic of conversation.”

“Like hell it isn’t.” Louis jerks lightly out of his grip and saunters away. When Liam catches him chatting to Niall a moment later, he sees his fellow DI shoot him a reproachful look while he fishes for his wallet. Like somehow Liam’s accountable for all bids the team decides to place on his personal life.

He shrugs, wincing for effect, before joining Zayn back at his corner desk.

The boy’s gaze flickers up, motion magnified by the lenses of the thick-rimmed glasses. “That doesn’t look like chicken and dosas,” he mutters, returning to the paper in front of him.

Liam blinks. “You didn’t actually think I was going to go, like, procure you a takeaway just because you had a craving.”

“It’s just down the street.” Zayn flips the paper, scanning the back. “Were the victims all cut up with the same blades, do you think? Like exact same. I imagine they’d wear.”

“Twenty blocks east is not  _down the street,_ ” Liam informs him, sliding into his own chair. Their knees bump, warm points of contact. “And uh, not sure. There were no inconsistencies in serration found, though. That I know of.” He rips open the tiny baggie of baby carrots, dipping one into the tub of hummus he’d dug out from behind Cabello’s pasta. “Could ask Tommo.” He crunches on his snack, waving a fresh carrot under Zayn’s nose until the boy looks at it like it’s personally offended him.

“These aren’t even  _warm,_ ” he grumbles, pushing Liam’s hand away. “I don’t want to talk to Louis, you do it.”

Liam grunts, swallowing his food. “Why don’t you want to talk to Lou?” His nose wrinkles. “Please tell me you don’t actually eat warm carrots.”

“I meant warm  _food,_ idiot,” Zayn replies. He rolls his neck on his shoulders until he’s facing Liam, sardonic and sleepy-looking.

Yet another reason Liam wasn’t about to attempt an emergency food run: it’s nearly eleven on a Thursday and at this point, everyone just wants to finish their assigned task and go home.

“Don’t be bitchy,” Liam admonishes. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you cold, unsatisfying carrots.”

Zayn snaps his jaw once, revealing his teeth in a faux snarl before his lips drop back into a pout.

Liam gives no credence to the burst of warmth in his torso. “Tell me why you don’t want to talk to Louis.”

“I don’t like him,” Zayn says at full volume. Liam cranes his neck back and sees Louis staring at them from across the room, head cocked like he maybe heard that.

“Yes you do.” Liam says it slowly. “You like him more than you like me, I’m fairly sure. Can tell by how you’re actually  _nice_ to him.” He scratches his arm. “Comparatively.”

“That’s not—” Zayn bites his lip, cutting himself off with a frustrated sigh through his nose.

It’s a thing he does, Liam’s noticed, like maybe he doesn’t fully trust the people around him to understand what he’s talking about. Constantly biting back whatever he’s thinking, thoughts too potent or complex for his peers.

Seems a bit lonely.

“I’ll ask him,” Liam offers, rising from his chair.

“If you two run off to smoke I’ll remove your fingers while you sleep,” Zayn hums out, stretching his arms behind him. “Takes about as much force as cutting a carrot. By the way.”

Jesus. “Is that your way of saying you want me to spend the night?” Liam asks, undertone low and snagging on amusement with each syllable.

“As if you don’t want to.” Zayn flicks a wayward baby carrot off the desk and onto the floor.

Liam strides away with a pointed eye roll, mussing Horan’s hair as he passes him.

“Mmf,” Horan groans, face nearly pressed into the desk.

“Go  _sleep,_ Niall,” Liam chides over his shoulder. His is tone light, filled with an insistent buoyancy that he’s stubbornly pushing on the other DI.  He suspects that Horan feels responsible for not getting to the fishing boat before it was burnt to a waterlogged shell, uneven smiles and dark circles under his eyes a testament to misplaced guilt. It’s not a good look for him, someone whose face is only ever meant to be occupied by beaming grins or shrewd analysis in light eyes.

With any luck, the full report from Arson that’s been promised to them tomorrow morning will help him breathe easier. Help them all breathe easier.

There’s only so much you can destroy with flame.

Tomlinson rushes an agreement to look into the weapons profiling for the case, muttering something about how he’s not surprised Zayn was curious about that detail. He tacks on a quick invite out for drinks the next night.

“Just the usual crowd, Niall and Harry and probably Cami,” he says. “Bring your boy, obviously.”

The phrasing makes Liam’s ears feel hot. It’s too late in the day to bother arguing about it. “We’ll see.”

“Cool,” says Tomlinson. “Fancy a smoke before you take off?”

Yes. “I’ll—pass,” Liam says with a small shake of his head. “I’ve got—”

“Spare us,” Tomlinson cuts across, squeezing Horan’s shoulder when the man tilts his head to the side to stare up at Liam with one accusatory eye.

They say their goodbyes—Liam does, anyway, Zayn slinking ahead of him out the station door—and do, actually, end up going to grab food from the all-night place Zayn wanted earlier.

Zayn is attempting to insert his key into the door, lecturing Liam on the rationality of the demand so quickly and efficiently that the detective’s work-foggy brain swims with it. Liam watches, hazily amused, as Zayn fumbles the key and drops it. He bends down to pick it up without once pausing in his rapid speech.

“—cortisol stimulates the, you know, paraventricular nucleus’ production of the neuropeptide responsible for appetite, and  _specifically_ carbohydrates. Which is fairly basic science, Liam, I shouldn’t have to tell you this.” The door clicks; Zayn throws it inward and leaves Liam to keep it from banging into the wall.

Which he does, balancing two takeout containers in his other hand.

“Cortisol, that’s a—stress thing, right?” Liam prods, squeaking open the container of Dhaka chicken.

“Can be,” Zayn replies, pulling the container out of Liam’s grip the second it’s opened, “though you can drop the whole ‘pretending to listen’ thing, it’s weird.”

Liam frowns, distributing sauces and plastic utensils where they sit at Zayn’s small, spotless table. “I’m not pretending.”

“Pretending to care, then,” Zayn modifies, stabbing a fork into his chicken. “Whatever.”

Liam watches him eat for a moment, the expansion and contraction of his jaw as he chews, the glazed look in his eye while he zones out to the taste good takeaway after a long night.

Zayn’s classes start again in a couple weeks; Liam wonders if he’ll still want to play murder investigation when he has his books and lectures and classmates to occupy his time.

It’s an unpleasant thought, that Zayn might evaporate as easily as he’d appeared, smoke off Liam’s lips. A streetlight shining bright and sudden overhead before flickering out again.

“It’s interesting to hear you talk about,” Liam says instead of any of that. “Not that—like, I’m fairly certain you made up the word  _neuropeptide,_ but it’s interesting anyway. The way you talk about it.”

He focuses on his curry for a moment before looking up to find Zayn staring at him liking he’s piecing something together for himself. “Appetite is managed in the hypothalamus,” he says finally, syrupy slow and thoughtful. “Partially, anyway.”

Liam takes another bite of his curry, nodding along and flourishing his fork in a  _do go on_  gesture.

Zayn’s quiet, though, dark eyes intent on Liam’s face. “So’s sexual desire,” he informs him.

It’s such an obvious lead-in. Liam sort of wants to teach Zayn about interrogation techniques. Biblically.

An hour later, Liam has Zayn hissing out a breath as he lets Liam’s stubble rasp along his inner thighs, swollen lips sucking at patches of skin as he goes. He looks up at Zayn with eyes he can only imagine are stained the color of pitch by the want that thrums through him like an engine’s purr.

“Obscene,” Zayn murmurs, hand coming down to trace Liam’s lips with his thumb like a benediction. Liam nips at the pad of it before sucking the digit into his mouth, savoring the feel of the yielding flesh and the bone beneath it.

He pops up the bed to lay a kiss to Zayn’s mouth. He hopes it bruises. The boy’s lips are already slightly parted, line of his throat exposed when his head tips back against the pristine sheets.

It’s the way he gets the only time he’s not completely in control, naked and under Liam and wanting so plainly it’s dizzying. Hotter than anything Liam’s experienced.

“Should see yourself,” he counters. His next kiss is gentler, soothing the sting of his teeth.

They don’t fuck gently. It’s rough the way Liam knew Zayn liked from the start, one hand pressing to his shoulder and the other scraping along the soft skin of his exposed side, then abandoning the action to slip two fingers into Zayn’s mouth up to the second knuckle. He revels in the slick heat of it, the greedy movements of the boy’s tongue, the ways his eyelashes fan across his cheeks while he takes it.

They don’t fuck loudly. That’s more a symptom of the late hour, the fatigue weighing down Liam’s tongue and keeping him from spilling scorching, filthy words like wayward sparks over Zayn’s bare flesh. It means that he can hear the exact way Zayn’s breathing goes fast and a little reedier when he’s close. Can enjoy the shuddering exhale when he comes, mouth dropped open in a look that’s nearly surprised and disarmingly sweet.

They don’t fuck long. Zayn feels like sin and looks like salvation and tastes like the food he demanded Liam buy him earlier. He smells like arousal and that fucking leather jacket and  _Liam,_ and there’s something to that, the detective hazily realizes, something to that sense of claiming that has him tumbling from the edge into his own release.

The room is tinted blue by night, shadows eating away at the negative space when Liam finally mentions it. It’s not a fair tactic, bringing it up in the drowsy-sweet moments after orgasm.

He never did promise to play fair, though.

Liam speaks clearly, letting the words ring starkly against the softness of the night. “D’you let other guys fuck you bare?”

Zayn—he doesn’t even tense  _up_ , just opens his eyes like a sun-drowsing cat might, unsurprised and unmoved. “Yes.”

There’s mercury in Liam’s stomach, cold swirling toxin. “You’re in the biology doctoral program,” he says slowly, so as to resist screaming the words, “and you’re letting boys fuck you bare.”

Zayn’s still sleepy, still unimpressed as he holds Liam’s burning stare in the darkness. “You like me reckless,” he levelly accuses. There’s no inflection to it.

It blisters through Liam like a line of solder anyway. “I like you s—” he bites out, stopping on the brink of the truth. “I like you risk-aware,” he modifies.  With a sigh, “You’re the dumbest fucking person I know, sometimes.”

“Why, Li?” Zayn says on a groaned exhale, stretching his legs as he breathes out the nickname. His ankles slide back across the sheets until Liam can’t feel the heat of his legs. “’Cause I’m not boring enough to only want it if it’s wrapped?” He gives Liam a look like—like that’s  _amusing,_ the notion of safe sex, of  _protecting oneself._ ”’Cause I actually like to  _feel_ something when I’m—”

Liam’s on him before he’s fully processed his own movements, hips flush with Zayn’s and hand cradling his jaw with his thumb in the hollow under his chin, pressing ever so slightly down. “You feel plenty,” he asserts.

Zayn’s breath hitches with the press of Liam’s thumb. “Could fee a hell of a lot more,” he counters.

“Seemed like you were feeling a hell of a lot earlier, sweetheart.” Liam can feel the vibration of Zayn’s breath in his throat when it starts to pick up.

Like a sudden flicker of light, Zayn’s expression shifts, becomes open and pleading. Yielding. He tips his head back further, baring his throat to the light press of Liam’s hand as he murmurs, “Try it?” Huge honey eyes lit by errant city light. “Please?” Zayn breathes this last out like a supplication, something it costs him dearly to ask for.

To feel Liam in him, not an inch left that isn’t touching.

Liam swallows against a rush of desire. Imagines it, the perfect heat of Zayn around him, the blown-out look on his face when Liam slides home, gives it to him better than he’s ever had it.

His hips grind down once into Zayn’s at the thought, dirty and perfect and  _scalding_ him with how hot it is _._ Then he catches the look on the boy’s face, smug beneath the easy desire.

It clicks.

“You’re playing me,” he realizes. Liam rolls off Zayn onto his back, heels of his hands coming up to press into his eyes. “Fucking  _hell,_ Zayn.”

“And if it almost worked on  _you,_ ” Zayn intones easily, like this is an ongoing dialogue, “all righteous and noble and whatever else…” He contradicts the dark swirl of his words with the way he rolls to splay his leg over top Liam’s, tucks his head under Liam’s chin on his chest. “Imagine how well that works on people with fewer compunctions.”

Liam hisses out an infuriated breath even as his arm comes to wrap around Zayn’s shoulders. “ _Why,_ ” he manages.

Zayn shrugs awkwardly where he’s pressed into Liam’s side. “Always figured ‘why not’ was the more compelling question,” he answers, something cryptic about it.

Warmth radiates from Zayn’s narrow frame where he’s pressed to Liam, relaxed and open and as easy as he ever gets. Liam licks his lips, coming to a decision. “Shouldn’t do this again,” he says, “until you agree to get tested. For—everything.”

His arm is already tensed in expectation when Zayn tries to pull away. “Fuck off,” Zayn hisses, thumping on Liam’s chest with a fist. He either doesn’t have the leverage or the desire to make it hurt. “Right to  _hell,_ Liam, you don’t control my fucking body.”

“I don’t, no,” Liam concedes, “but I control mine, and—stop fucking fidgeting,” he admonishes, flicking Zayn hard on his sharp collarbone. He stills, which is something. “And I’m not going to fuck someone who’s that— _callous,_ with their health. Zayn.”

“ _What,_ ” Zayn whines, teeth digging into the side of Liam’s pec like it’ll make him stop talking, telling Zayn things he doesn’t want to hear. Needs to hear.

“Are you gonna do that for me,” Liam asks softly. His fingers trace the sinew of Zayn’s shoulder, the jut of the underlying bone.

“No,” Zayn replies far too quickly.

“Are you gonna do that for  _you,_ ” Liam tries. He feels not unlike he’s coaxing a reluctant toddler into eating their peas.

Zayn sighs, exasperated. “Sleep,” he commands, nuzzling into Liam’s chest in a way the man is tempted to call  _grumpy._ ”Be annoying about it tomorrow if you have to.”

With something distressingly close to instinct, Liam presses a kiss to the crown of Zayn’s hair. Smells his fruity styling pomade. “I’m gonna.”

“Dick,” Zayn slurs into his warm skin.

 

It turns out that Liam’s unable to be annoying about it the next day; he wakes to the shrill of his mobile’s alarm and no Zayn.

The light is gray and heavy to match the sluicing of heavy rain against the windows, but it’s plenty to see the unoccupied half of the bed. Liam runs a sleep-clumsy hand over the mussed sheet. Cold.

When he pads out into the living area in his boxers, he’s met with more of the same. Bleak and gray and empty.

The door on the far side of the living room is shut tight.

“Zayn?” Liam calls. It echoes around the unoccupied space, gives him nothing.

Gone, then, though where Zayn felt he needed to be at six in the morning is unclear and vexing.

“So fucking weird,” Liam mutters to himself, rubbing at his forehead and stumbling back to the bathroom to take a piss.

He’s washing his hands and staring in the mirror when he notices its slant, the internal medicine cabinet behind it. Muzzy and unthinking, he pulls at the bottom edge of the mirror with two fingers, flicking it open.

Shelves cleaned to surgical grade, just like the rest of the bathroom. A razor and a stick of antiperspirant. A set of nail clippers and a fairly used emery board. A bottle of anti-septic, nearly empty. Liam takes it all in impassively, brain cataloging on autopilot. Deduces the snippets of information about Zayn Malik he could have rattled off from memory already: Meticulous in appearance. Physically reckless.

His gaze zeroes in on the neat line of prescription bottles on the bottommost shelf. One, two, three,  _four_ orange containers, capsules and tablets, blue and pink and white.

“Shit.” Liam slams the mirror shut, sees his wince in its reflection.

He refuses to look, see the rambling names on each container. It’s not his to know, even if the possibilities are beating an anxious tattoo into his ribcage.

Still, there’s no helping the cold slice of fear when he thinks about his conversation with Zayn last night.

_Antibiotics,_ his brain supplies. _Antiretrovirals._

“Don’t think about it,” Liam mutters to himself. Loki is probably waiting with his head on his front paws by Liam’s door, more prepared than the detective for their morning run.

Slipping on his clothes, Liam shoots Zayn a text asking where he’s ended up.

He readjusts the medicine cabinet to hang slightly ajar again before he slides out the door, making sure it locks behind him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Zayn turns his head to Liam, finally, impassive despite the heavy words falling from his mouth. “He’ll rot there. And that’s as far as the story ever goes.”_
> 
> _The words are colorless, sterile. They make Liam’s stomach twist. “You think about that a lot?”_
> 
> _Zayn’s expression flickers, eyes glittery in the near dark. “No.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here's the thing: I do stuff that isn't writing/editing fic. Sometimes, as a consequence of that, stuff takes a little longer to get published. Asking me when one might next expect an update will always be answered the same way: I don't know. I never do. Eventually, and definitely, but I can never guarantee a _when._  
> 
> 
> I'm immensely grateful to all of you for reading and leaving such lovely comments. The truth, though, is that pressing me for when I'm going to update actually does the opposite of what you hope it will--I don't find it motivating, I find it stressful and creativity-destroying. Please don't do that. Thank you.  
> 
> 
> Anyway! Sorry this took about a week longer than usual. Many thanks to Caitlin and Monica and my cat, who will not appreciate this acknowledgement because she can't read because she's a cat.  
> 
> 
> Have at it. Find me on tumblr at protagonist-m.

There’s a stabbing waiting for Liam at the station.

“Triple homicide,” Delevingne says, words half-drowned in her coffee.

“I can see that.” Liam takes a swallow from his own mug. Feels his throat scald. Coughs, just a little. “Fuck.”

It’s only photos, the bodies long since carried off to Styles or one of his underlings. Brutal viewing, though. Three men, all podgy in a way that means desk jobs, all sporting a handful of stab wounds that stain their button-downs burgundy and ruin the light upholstery of the furniture.

Liam tilts his head, narrows his eyes at the photos. His fingers itch to move toward the cigarettes in his back pocket. “Weapon?”

“Unrecovered.” Delevingne mimics his pose, only a little mocking.

Liam frowns. “Grouping doesn’t suggest they were moved about after—” He gestures to his own torso, short jabs with his fingers into the fabric of his shirt. “Which means they were, what? Just sitting on the couch? With one in the chair.”

Delevingne hums an agreement, knowing to let Liam finish verbally processing. She reaches out, straightens one of the photos infinitesimally.

“Whose flat was it?” he asks.

The sergeant points to the man on the right. Good shoes, Liam notes.

“He married?”

She shakes her head. “It was only called in because this one’s wife woke up this morning and he still wasn’t home. She ended up going over there.” She makes a sympathetic clicking noise at the back of her throat. “’S a shit morning if I’ve ever heard of one.”

Liam splays his hands over Delevingne’s desk where they stand, hunches a bit to manage it. “Neighbors didn’t think to call it in?” he asks. “Three blokes stabbed to death, would’ve made some noise.”

The Detective Sergeant has these deeply expressive eyebrows, bold and rather defining on her otherwise delicate face. They move now, flattening and then arching as she thinks it through.

Liam picks up the case file, skimming the introductory information again. “No sign of a forced entry,” he notes.

“Someone they knew,” Delevingne concludes. She taps one short, blunted nail on the desk, pensive.

Liam nods. “And no sign of a struggle?”

Delevingne shrugs. “The catacomb will know by now. Fancy a walk?”

“Fancy a smoke,” Liam mutters, but he downs more of his coffee and follows her to the lifts.

It bugs him enough that he finally caves once the doors of the lift slide closed and they begin their descent. “Question.”

“Fire away.”

“Why were we assigned a triple homicide when we’re already handling a serial murder spree?”

Delevingne’s face shifts, expression souring. “You’re not gonna like it.”

Liam runs a finger over the divide between the mirrored wall and the wood paneling at waist level. “I don’t like lots of stuff. Just tell me.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Liam watches her reflection deliberate, jaw working.

Finally, “Winston seems to be under the impression we have nothing else of note going on.” She shifts her weight from one foot to another, expression still mildly acidic. “His words.”

Hissing out a breath between his teeth, Liam allows himself to glower sightlessly for a moment. “Are they.”

“Mm,” Delevingne grunts, bitterness a match for Liam’s own.

The lift dings softly and they don’t talk about it anymore.

Styles is indeed in the lab, smile bright when he sees them enter and only a fraction dimmer when he processes that neither of them are a well-tanned pathologist.

“You two here for the Puncture Pals?” he asks, a little too cheery.

“You’re horrid,” Liam declares, but he has trouble injecting any real scorn into it. Might be the early hour, the disorienting and now gruesome start to his day. “Show us what you’ve got.”

Styles rolls the bodies out one by one, walking them through what each vicious stab wound means, and when it was inflicted, and which one in particular likely ended the life of the body before them.

“But no signs of struggle,” Delevingne verifies.

The medical examiner purses his lips and tosses up one hand, blasé among the dead. Per usual. _“_ No bruising, no superficial cuts, no blood or tissue under any of their nails—which is unfortunate, because that’d get us where we need to go.” He fiddles with a strand of dark hair that’s come unwound from his bun, twisting it around his finger before tucking it behind his ear. “It’s like someone walked up, asked if they’d like to be stabbed, then went ahead and…” he trails off, eyes spacey, “…did it.”

Liam looks up from the gaunt face of the man on the table— _Arther Roman,_ says the tag—to Styles, staring off into the distance still.

“H,” he prompts. “Harry, hey.”

The man’s eyes refocus, peculiar green in the clean light of the lab. “Yeah,” he responds, “I’m gonna—run a blood test, I think.”

Delevingne stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Liam as they watch Styles throw together blood samples from each of the victims. “I love that,” she says in an undertone.

“Hm?” Liam palms his phone, checking to see if any messages have come through from—anyone. Anyone who might need him at all. In general.

“All this investigative-deductive shit, so much of it is pieced together in people’s heads.” Delevingne keeps her eyes on Styles while the man fills a series of vials with blood, motions precise. “Those little lightbulb moments, you know what I mean? You can see them—y’know, happen—” she makes a small, explosive gesture near her head, “—like,  _ding._ But you can never predict when they’re coming. Little epiphanies that solve cases.”

“Ding,” Liam echoes thoughtfully. “That’s true. Fucking satisfying, though, when they hit you.”

The sergeant turns. Gives him an odd look. “Y’sound so much like Zayn right now.”

Liam’s jaw, extended in a yawn, snaps shut. “If you need time off to get your ears checked, I’m happy to cover you.”

“ _’Fucking satisfying,’_ ” Delevingne echoes, voice dropped an octave to mimic Liam’s. “The singularity is approaching.”

“How’s it coming?” Liam calls across the lab. Styles peeks up from his row of test tubes, brow furrowed. He wiggles a hand in the air noncommittally, uncapping a bottle of something viscous.

“He coming out tonight?” Delevingne continues, unfazed by the tightness at Liam’s mouth, the stiffness in his shoulders.

“Cara,” he rebukes.

“None of that,” she rejoins, “just asking an innocent question. Between mates.”

Liam sighs. He’s spared giving the explanation, the  _I don_ _’t know because I couldn’t ask this morning because he disappeared before the sun was up and left me alone in his goddamn flat,_ by Styles making a low, triumphant noise.

“Check it out,” he calls with a grand gesture toward the vials.

“We’re not fluent in chemicals, Harry,” Delevingne reminds him, sauntering over nonetheless.

Liam follows. He notes the purple tinge to the liquid in the six tubes, lined up and filled to an exact point at the hands of an expert.

“You’re fluent in foul play, though, yeah?” Styles returns, dimple appearing with his winning grin. “So tell me why these guys were all loaded up on alcohol and  _rohypnol_.”

The DI doesn’t have to look to know Delevingne’s mirroring his expression, shocked and intrigued, but mostly—

“Ding,” Liam mutters.

 

They put out an order for any unmatched fingerprints found at the scene and prepare for interviews of those the victims left behind. A simple matter, figuring who might hold such a vicious grudge—Liam forgets, sometimes, that most people aren’t their serial killer. Most people crack under the strain of their atrocities instead of thriving off of them—and it’s not pleasant, exactly, triple homicide, but Liam finds himself a bit giddy with the progress nonetheless.

It’s just. It’s movement. He’d forgotten, nearly, what it was like to see a case through. See someone made accountable.

The interviews come first. Delevingne is with the wife of the married victim in an interviewing room, but since Helena Price, mother of one of the victims, is apparently housebound, it’s on Liam to go to her.

Which, not a problem. Never a problem, when it solves murders. He shrugs into his jacket to beat the deluge outside, turning toward the door as he does.

Zayn appears the way light flickers.

He’s got his hair swept up into that dark quiff, like he took the time to style it between waking up and disappearing from his flat in the first dark hours of the day. He’s in a deep red jumper. The color burnishes the pale russet of his skin where he stands in the doorway.

And he’s unharmed, as far as Liam can tell. Something unknots in his gut.

“Where’d you get to this morning?” Liam mutters, not quite facing the boy as he pulls at the zip of his jacket.

There’s no response. Peeking up at Zayn, he sees his eyes are a little distant, a little glassy.

“Zayn,” he tries again, softer.

The boy slides a listless glance to him. “Yeah,” he responds, irritation a habit under the whisper-quiet exhaustion in his word.

Liam thinks of orange bottles, neat and imposing.

_Anticoagulants,_ his mind suggests.  _Inotropics._

“Where were you when I woke up?” he asks. A wince immediately follows—he hadn’t meant to expose the nakedness of the question. Had meant to mask the ridiculous vulnerability of it before giving it voice.

Zayn doesn’t appear to notice, still lethargic where he sways slightly on thin legs. “Elsewhere,” he replies, voice a low sing-song.

Liam’s lips twitch into a frown. He thinks back on a night that feels like a lifetime ago, a distressed boy who’d narrowly escaped a mugging at knifepoint nodding off in a police cruiser on the way home.

He hasn’t seen that boy in a very long time; his appearance now has the detective a bit bewildered.

“Let me—” Liam swallows. “Let me take you home, okay?”  _Opiates. Barbiturates._

Zayn’s gaze focuses a bit, at that. “Always trying to get rid of me, aren't you?” he says. His brow furrows like he's honestly offended. Like that accusation made any sense.

And Liam stumbles. “Just seem tired,” he lamely supplies. What the hell is going on. “Winston’ll be in soon anyway, c’mon.”

How often has Liam seen Zayn in the morning? During the day, even. He racks his brain while he drives, eyeing the drowsy boy in the passenger seat.

He’s diffuse in the early daylight. It’s—it’s different, Liam thinks, from his sharp, enthralling angles in the dead of night or lithe pre-dawn vulnerability, the perfect exposure of him in sleep. It’s a direct contrast to the first. It’s a close cousin of the second.

But it’s different.

“Where were you going,” Zayn says, voice strained like it’s hard to speak, “when I came in earlier.”

Liam swallows. “Interview for an investigation,” he says levelly. “Why did you—” he drums his fingers on the wheel, deliberating. “Why were you at the station at ten in the morning?”  _Where were you at_ six  _in the morning?_

Zayn has his head pressed to the window, eyes on the rush of morning traffic in the rain. He needs a shave, probably, coarse hair dusting his face in earnest. There are tired bruises under his eyes, accentuated by the red of his jumper.

He doesn’t answer for a long moment. When he does, Liam can’t decide if he wishes he hadn’t.

“Didn’t trust myself to make it home without you,” Zayn mumbles. There’s a slur to it, but he doesn’t rush the words awkwardly or skew them with uncertainty.

It sounds like the truth.

“Zayn,” Liam says, embarrassed by how his voice hints at breaking on the simple syllable.

“Just get me home, Li,” he says, eyelids fluttering like he’s fighting to keep them open.

So Liam does. There’s not really time—he’s meant to be nearly to the home of the stabbing victim’s mother by now—but he walks Zayn to his door anyway, resisting the pervasive urge to tuck him under his arm and shoulder them both through the door. Into the bedroom. Into the warmth of each other.

Zayn is more or less propped up against the doorway, rifling through his pocket for his keys. He’s listing slightly to the side, grimacing like something hurts.

Liam wants to push back his sleeves, check for bruises, wants to crack Zayn open and peer inside just once, just for a minute.

Zayn  manages to get the door open; Liam doesn’t do any of that. Can’t, maybe. Won’t, absolutely. He settles for crowding into Zayn’s space and palming the back of his skull with both hands. Settles for pressing his lips to Zayn’s slack mouth, all heavy implication in a tiny breathless instant. 

He pulls back and feels something tear at him with the way Zayn looks into his eyes, nonplussed and hazy.

“Get some rest,” Liam says, and it’s soft enough he can hope the pleading note will go unnoticed by the distanced boy before him. He lets his hands fall from the back of Zayn’s head until they’re useless weights back at his own sides. “Text me later.”

Zayn says nothing, the bastard, still inaccessible as the fucking moon. He just flattens his mouth into something that’s neither a smirk nor a frown and floats inside, snicking the door shut behind him.

Liam’s heart is beating far too quickly for the situation to merit. He wants to hit something or scream.

He wants to ask a lot of questions, mostly.

But  _questions_ reminds him of  _interviews_ which reminds him that, right, there’s a world outside of the dizzying spin of Zayn Malik.

There are three men dead and no answers just yet.

He goes to do his job, neatly packing away the unkind tangle of his thoughts.

 

“The brother,” Winston echoes, dark brows raised in a look that conveys passive approval.

“Twin brother,” Liam confirms. “Kennedy Price. Fingerprints all over the flat.” He scratches at his nose, voice delicate to add, “There was a history of mental health issues.”

It’s not a fact Liam savors sharing; he’s well aware of the stigma surrounding mental illness at the Met.  They’re taught early in training never to profile, never to assume, and yet he keeps seeing officers make that treacherous leap: from psychosis to violence, from disorder to destruction.

Cases like this make it easier for them to get away with, words like _precedent_ a handy crutch that keep everyone complacent in their role perpetuating what’s only ever been a vicious social cycle.

Murder, though, is murder. For all that Price needs treatment more than he needs incarceration, Liam’s hands are effectively tied. No court is going to care what the arresting officer has to say in a killer’s defense.

Days like today make Liam fear that he might be as bad as anyone else. His mind was working through the wobbly admission from Helena Price regarding the increasingly erratic behaviors of her grown son, still living at home to care for her, before she’d even finished. Seeing the sepulchral man fidget at the top of the stairs like his skin was going to fall off the entire time Liam sat in the living room—cramped with medical equipment and the rotting doily wreckage of a poorly-maintained lifetime—read like a heavy hint that something was dangerously off.

Still, he might have written it off to unconscious bias if Kennedy Price hadn’t outright confessed with jerky, repentant speech.

“And he just gave it up.” Winston tutts like a school chaplain disappointed in the attitudes of an ill-mannered charge. “Pitiful.”

Liam doesn’t let his lip curl in contempt. “He wasn’t receiving the care he needed.”

Winston sniffs, eyes already glazing over with boredom. “Always seems to be the charity cases,” he quips. “Life’s a bit shit sometimes, isn’t it.” He shuffles a handful of paper in a manner Liam suspects is meant to imply he should leave, as the man really is  _terribly busy._ “But good news for us. And good work to you and Delevingne.”

The detective swallows the hot, dry coals the whole interaction has filled his mouth with. “Thank you, sir,” he says, rising.

“Make sure she knows I said so.”

“Will do.”

“And Payne?”

Liam turns, hand resting on the doorknob.

Winston is giving him a look that’s mostly appraising, if Liam is reading the narrowing of his eyes right. “Try and look lively, yeah? You just solved a triple homicide, no need to be quite so…tense.” Winston wiggles his nose to dispel an itch. “You really did do good work.”

Liam offers a smile that doesn’t sit quite right on his face. “Thank you, sir.”

The man shrugs, offering a small, ill-fitting smile of his own. Liam makes his escape into the chilly hallway where he’s free to brood.

Would be, anyway, were someone not waiting for him.

“Alright, Tommo,” he greets, wary of the laser focus in the pathologist’s eye.

The man doesn’t say anything for a moment, just stares at Liam like he’s sizing him up. Wholly unsettling.

“Just caught up with Cara,” he finally says. “Congrats on your case. Triple homicide sorted within the day…” he quirks a smile that, in contrast to Winston’s, seems sincere, if minuscule. “…not bad for a lad with such stupid hair.”

“Aw,” Liam coos. “What’re you doing lurking in the hall? Gonna carry my books and walk me to class?”

Tomlinson’s expression dims slightly. “Price,” he says quietly, “he had a bit of a history, yeah?”

Liam opens his mouth and closes it before indicating that Tomlinson should walk with him.

“He…” Liam organizes it in his head, the stark truth of violence and the messy incomprehensibility of mental illness left to fester. “He needed treatment, as a kid. Badly.”

At Tomlinson’s enquiring look, he reluctantly elaborates. “Paranoid schizophrenia. And uh,” he scratches at his nose, “homicidal ideation.”

The man had been skittish like a feral animal, wan and hollow when Liam had stared him down. His nails were bitten down to the quick, painful-looking when he rubbed at his face, jerky body movements eerily reminiscent of arthropods.

He hadn’t fought, when they cuffed him. Liam wondered who would be left to care for his mother.

Tomlinson swears. “His own brother,” he mutters. “People are fucking terrifying.”

Liam thinks of the respirators. The tubes and wires, an endless thicket of medical-grade brambles. The absolute filth of the rest of the house.

The ruination of its only remaining son.

“Might’ve gone different,” he says, “if he’d ever really got the help he needed.” He licks his lips, thinks over the tremulous explanations of the mother, voice echoing in the respirator she wore. That the other son—the dead son—promised he would visit sometime soon, truly did mean to call. Was just terribly busy, doing such important work in finance. “His brother—there’s no way he didn’t  _see_ what was happening _,_ that neglect.”

“Might’ve,” Tomlinson muses, “and it’s shit that it’ll never go a different way now, but it is what it is, okay? Don’t—don’t tear yourself up over this, like you do.”

Liam wants to go sink his teeth into something to ease the ache in his jaw, the thrum of tension an insistent reminder of something left unfulfilled.

A life, maybe.

“That why you came to chat me up?” Liam asks as they round the corner. He doubts it.

“Kind of. But no, uh.” Tomlinson looks down, blue eyes on gray-flecked tile. “I actually had a question about Zayn.”

Liam’s skin prickles as he pushes into their office. “Yeah,” he says slowly, drawn out in warning.

Tomlinson doesn’t flinch. “Is he using?”

Liam slams the office door closed again, ignores the startled glances of his team through the safety glass. Louis looks small and tan and capable in the hall lighting, crisp blue button-down cuffed high enough to show the lines of sinew that define his a forearms, the tendons in his hands, half-stuffed into his trouser pockets.

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” Liam hisses, chest hot.

And Louis is ice-blue composure, unruffled by the tempest in Liam’s gaze. “Judging by your reaction, mate, a fairly valid one.”

Shuttering his expression as best he can, Liam speaks slowly to keep his tone level. “No,” he replies, “he’s not  _using._ ” The words don't even sound right in the air, discussion too far removed from reality to mesh with it. 

No matter what the twist of unease in Liam's stomach would have him believe. No matter what vibrant orange image lingers behind his eyes.

Louis nods like Liam’s said the opposite. “Alright,” he agrees quietly. Liam bristles at the tenor, overly soothing. Like he’s a kid on a bridge railing, megaphone voices in one ear and the howling of the wind in the other.

“Liam,” Louis says in that same hateful tone, “you know I—I like Zayn, he’s a hell of a lad. A bloody brilliant man.”

“You think he’s a junkie,” Liam spits, thoughts eddying into something hydrochloric.

“Thi—I’m a  _doctor,_ ” Louis says, all hard edges now. _”_ Did we see the same guy this morning?”

A coarse laugh. “ _One_ bad morning—”

“So you admit it was bad?” Louis presses. “Look, I heard you ask him where he was when you woke up. You met him in an  _alley,_ ” Louis continues over Liam’s snarled protest, “he routinely shows up on our doorstep  _beaten to shit,_ and you don’t see—” an erratic hand gesture, “ _anything_ weird about that?”

It’s an assault of images, skin bruised purple, fists on teeth, a bright, tidy row of bottles.

It doesn’t add up to what Louis is suggesting. Can’t. The detective remembers his thoughts as he and Zayn stood in the boy’s doorway, the urge to check him over for anything to indicate he might be—

“I would know if he was an addict,” Liam insists. “He’s—he’s intense, he’s  _very_ fucking intense, alright, but he’s not that.”

When Louis appears unmoved, he tacks on, “Lou. Trust me to know that much, at least?  _Me._ ” He tries not to trace the pleading note in his tone.

_You sound so much like Zayn,_ comes Cara’s voice, a hot thrum of memory. Vivid with how the moment gouged at him.

Louis opens his mouth like maybe there’s more, something else he couldpossiblysay besides  _you_ _’re right, mate, I’m sorry,_ when the door cracks open.

“Louis,” Horan says brusquely, peering out at them, “Cami wants you for something.”

The man’s jaw works for a moment. “Cheers, Nialler,” he manages, like the words have a texture he doesn’t agree with. He slides through the gap Horan creates when he takes Tomlinson’s place in the hall.

“Let’s have a smoke,” Niall says, decisive. He grips Liam’s arm and begins hauling him toward the back lot.

Liam lets himself be towed, attempting to outpace the betrayed anger that laces every muscle, floods every seething vein.

Niall must understand; he’s silent as he stuffs a cigarette in Liam’s hand and flicks open his lighter.

They stand for a minute, eyes on the persistent drizzle from where they’re tucked under an overhang.

Blowing out an efficient lungful of smoke, Horan speaks. “Thought you might want out of that.”

Warmth diffuses Liam the same way the nicotine does. “Thank you.”

Niall shrugs. “Knew Lou was—worried,” he says, words careful and eyes toward the dark-washed pavement, “figured he’d track you down at some point to have a word.”

“A few fucking words, if we’re being honest,” Liam mutters around the cigarette. He inhales deep. Holds in the killing burn.

With a grunt of understanding, Niall tips his head back against the wall, exhales his own plume of smoke into the rain. “He means well,” he says. “Honestly, he does. We—we care. About you.” The man shrugs, but his eyes are cornflower blue and earnest. “We all do.”

It’s the truth, time and pressure conspiring to fuse their team like alloy under fire. Liam can’t ignore that. Refuses, on a basic level, to discount that bond.

“He called Zayn an addict,” Liam emphasizes, because that’s what it is, really, that’s the bone stuck in his goddamn craw. “ _Zayn,_ an addict.” He lets the resurgence of irritation flare with the ember on his cigarette on a hard inhale.

Niall gives him a narrow look. “Steady on,” he admonishes softly. “Lad’s got a sister who—struggles. She’s about Zayn’s age, yeah?”

The two-pronged reminder—of Louis' sister, of the not insignificant age gap between Zayn and himself—makes something disturbingly close to shame flare in Liam’s gut.

“Does it…” Liam sucks his lip into his mouth, bites down. “Is it—weird for any of you. My thing with him. How he’s always around.”

The other DI freezes for a moment, processing the question in that steady way of his. Then his posture melts back to something easy and familiar.

“He’s useful,” Niall says, flicking out his cigarette and crushing the butt beneath the heel of one loafer. “He’s dead smart, proper—proper science-minded.” He glances up at Liam briefly before averting his eyes once again, down to the toes of his shoes. “Fucking ridiculous to look at,” he adds as an aside, smile small.

Liam nods, flicking away his own cigarette. He knows all this, that Zayn is smart and excessively beautiful and precise like a blade’s edge.

“I meant more, like,” he tries, “do you  _like_ having him around.” It seems important that they do. Liam suspects Zayn would stop showing up if he asked, suspects, actually, that he might be why he shows up at all, but it’s not a suspicion he’s eager to test.

It’s Zayn; he’s never entirely sure of anything.

Niall grins bigger, nudging into Liam as they walk back inside. “Want us to approve of your boy, Payno?” he asks, Irish lilt bouncing along with the playful words.

The phrasing sends the same tremor of disquiet through Liam that is has every time it’s come up— _your boy,_ like he has any claim, like he has any right at all to Zayn’s mercurial attentions.

It’s still not worth fighting, not with only the imprecise language Liam has to describe what he and Zayn are to each other. Are not. Might be.

He wonders what word best sums up the way his lungs don’t properly fill until late that night, when he’s knocking on Zayn’s door with a text reading  _come over_ still burning into his mobile display.

 

There’s a bead of sweat dangerously close to the corner of Liam’s eye. He wipes at it with the heel of his hand and exhales hard, catching his breath in increments.

“And you figure they’re not going to factor it in with the verdict,” Zayn says, not missing a beat even with his voice torn up, his thumb wiping at the corner of his swollen mouth.

Liam nods, warm and lax and flopping back onto the bed, legs still hanging off the side with Zayn between them. “I’m sure they’ll give an insanity plea, but. Where’s he gonna go, you know? Any willing facility is going to be _horrendously_ underfunded.” He shifts a little to help Zayn stumble up from his knees to land next to him. “And he’s. He’s not going to be a priority, is he, with a triple homicide charge to his name.”

Zayn hums, low agreement. “It’s almost like the system works _against_ those that are different.”

Feeling his brow knit in puzzlement, Liam turns his head to look at the boy where he lays staring at the ceiling. “Different,” he muses. “He’s ill, Zayn.”

“And if he’d received proper treatment, he’d just be _different,_ ” the boy decides with dark inflections. He doesn’t look over to meet Liam’s gaze, catch his eyes where they’re wandering over his sharp profile against the half-light spilling in from the living room. “He’d be functional, yeah—wouldn’t be facing homicide charges—but he’d still be a paranoid schizophrenic in a society that has virtually no idea how to handle that.”

Liam scoots a bit closer until their shoulders touch. Takes that in. “You’re right.”

“I know.” Zayn throws an arm over his head, fingers curling under his hair. “Instead, though, he’s going to go to prison for a crime that was 100% preventable.” He turns his head to Liam, finally, impassive despite the heavy words falling from his mouth. “And he’ll rot there. And that’s as far as the story ever goes.”

The words are colorless, sterile. They make Liam’s stomach twist. “You think about that a lot?”

Zayn’s expression flickers, eyes glittery in the near dark, chest bare save for ink. “No.”

It’s sarcasm or it’s cynicism. Either way, Liam can hardly breathe through the weight of the topic.

Maybe it shows. “What else happened today?” Zayn asks.

There’s a car with a muffler in need of repair chugging by outside, beating against the quiet that sits comfortably between them. Liam thinks of his conversation with Louis, his accusations dressed as concerns.

“Nothing interesting,” Liam tells him quietly. “What about on your end? You never—” But he hadseen Zayn at the station today, hadn’t he? Listless gaze and lethargy oozing from his pores. So different from the boy who’d pushed him down onto the edge of the bed before so much as saying hello tonight. “Are you feeling…better?”

Zayn rolls his eyes, pulling away slightly. “That’s a bullshit question. I’m fine _._ Clearly.”

So defensive. Liam estimates the boy is about a second away from crossing his arms and huffing. There’s a pout on his lips, eyes back to tracing the patterns on the ceiling, determined to avoid Liam’s gaze.

Bloody endearing, that. “Just checking,” Liam softly says. On a synaptic impulse, he cranes his neck to press his lips to the delicate skin in front of Zayn’s ear.

“Get off me,” the boy snaps. He’s still grumbling as Liam hauls him further onto the bed, mouth intent.

 

The arson report slides onto the desk, displacing a stack of statements shuffled over from toxicology in the process.

Liam slides his gaze up to Cabello, unimpressed. “Good afternoon?”

“Remember this?” the woman asks, poking at the report. It’s looking a bit battered now, nearly a month old and pawed at by every member of the team twice over in search of anything that might be a lead.

There isn’t one. There’s a record of the accelerant used by the arsonist (naphtha-based lighter fluid: low flashpoint, moderate burn time, evaporates to leave no residue, ideal) and the starting point (the control panel in the fishing boat’s cockpit—soaked through with the fluid and utterly destroyed, like the majority of the deck), but it’s not enough to go on. It’s practically generic,as far as arsons go. That, paired with the lack of external evidence and the wharf’s conveniently faulty security cameras—and hadn’t Liam nearly had a conniption over _that_ —have left the team combing through the same fruitless body of evidence as ever, cagey and nearly sullen with it.

The boat could have contained anything. The fire could have been started by anyone. Two nights ago, Liam had murmured into the lean sinew of Zayn’s lower back that their next best bet would be another body. Then he continued kissing his way down, letting Zayn’s quiet laugh sooth the sting of the statement’s bleak reality.

“Looks vaguely familiar,” Liam says. Wait, is this—is this _our_ department’s?”

“Open it, for fuck’s sake.”

“Language,” Liam says mildly, flipping the file open for the hundredth time. “Oh.”

Fifteen minutes later, Liam is sending Cabello off in a nondescript vehicle to conduct an interview.

It was quick, as far as anonymous tips go. Potent, like an officer dreams they’ll be. The man had apologized for contacting the station on such a delay. He’d been concerned about what coming forward might mean for him and his family, two daughters and a wife pregnant with a third.

_It_ _’s organized,_ the transcript for the call reads. _A ring of them, they_ _’re hired to do these things for people who need to make problems go away._

He’d consented to meeting with one of them for an in-person interview, a bit shaky as he agreed. And now Liam is tapping on Tomlinson’s desk in a way even he can admit is obnoxious, bugging him about a late (late, late) lunch in hopes that he’ll be able to stop thinking about this case for more than five minutes.

Tomlinson quirks him a knowing look. “’M inviting Harry,” he says, rising to stand with his mobile in his palm.

The detective shrugs, easy. Watching Louis and Styles flirt is amusing, kind of sweet when it’s not nauseating. “No problem. Ni’s meeting us as well.”

Tomlinson nods, only a bit stiffly. It’s been harder than Liam could have imagined, trying not to let his still-raw feelings about the man’s ridiculous leap of logic the other week bleed over into his behavior toward him. It’s not that he’s above fighting with Louis—he spent their first months of acquaintanceship doing little else—but it’s. It’s such a _stupid_ thing to fall out over.

Even if they’re pretending they didn’t. Even if Tomlinson showed up at his desk the next morning with one of those overly-sweet hazelnut lattes Liam always talks himself out of, eyes big and blue and repentant. Even if Louis hasn’t brought it up since, in the middle of the day or when they’re at his flat or when Zayn is folded up in the corner of the office’s sofa, shedding his exacting light on their archived cases.

Still, the memory of Louis’ words creates friction against something that’s left Liam disquieted, something that makes him agitated and quick to snap when called to mind. Something he can’t quite let be.

And so he’s been watching.

It’s not prying, exactly. It’s _noticing._ And, truly, there’s been nothing suspect in the weeks following that strange morning where Zayn looked ready to collapse on the tile. Zayn sleeps in when he can and grumbles when he can’t, starts back up at school and meets Liam at the station and demands things at random, tea and food and backrubs and blowjobs. He studies in the murky light of Liam’s kitchen in the evening, lets Loki take Liam’s spot when they’re watching movies on the couch and Liam gets up to have a wee, argues directly into Liam’s mouth in slurred Urdu while Liam fucks him out of a strop after a long day of classes.

He’s _fine,_ is the point, mercurial and snippy and contrary and unyielding, under Liam and on top of him and in his head every fucking minute. A lower-frequency hum than the unpleasant buzz of the investigation between his ears. Just as constant.

He’s fine.

They’re crowded into the usual booth at the usual pub, Niall sliding into the end a bit later while they down the standard, greasy fare and set an amount they’ll each be taxed if they bring up the investigation.

“And then he made that _fucking_ Kipling joke,” Harry is saying, chip poised halfway to his mouth, “and I laughed, ‘cause I’m polite, but. Secretly? Wanted to deck him _so_ bad.” His tongue comes out slightly before he takes a bite, chewing as Louis makes a confused noise from beside him.

“Kipling joke?” he asks, snatching a chip off Harry’s plate despite having his own. “What’s…am I supposed to already know what—”

Niall shakes his head. “Do you like Kipling?”

Louis makes a face. “Like the poet?”

“No man, that’s the joke.” Niall smiles a little, patient and only the slightest bit patronizing. “They say, _‘do you like Kipling,’_ and you say, _‘I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.’_ ”

Harry makes a noise of disgust, shifting where he’s pressed against Louis on the opposite side of the booth.

Louis fishmouths. “That’s…wretched. That’s, like, that’s a properly terrible joke.” He turns to Harry. “Sounds like something you’d come up with.”

Hiding his snicker in a bite of a chip, Liam watches Harry turn to give Louis a look that falls short of properly insulted due to the adoration pouring from his eyes, all heady green light.

Liam’s pocket vibrates.

“Jesus,” he mutters, taking in the photo of a stark white skeleton with a long, Lovecraftian face.

The caption: _Thinking of you._

He gusts out a laugh. Quickly thumbs back an enquiry as to what _that_ _’s_ supposed to be, only interrupted by Harry’s voice.

“Oh, but he’s got the face on.”

“He does. Zayn, then,” chimes Louis.

Liam’s head jerks up. “What.”

Niall, at least, has the decency to look abashed. “You get this look,” he explains into his pint glass, “when it comes to him.”

There’s not a proper defense or deflection springing to mind. Liam simply explains. “He sent me a picture from his skeletal articulation lab— _what?_ ”

The groans die out as Harry mocks, “’ _Skeletal articulation._ _’_ That’s dreamy, Liam.”

“Fuck off, you run a morgue,” Liam mutters good-naturedly, taking a sip of his own pint. Zayn’s reply comes in.

_An immature male Ornithorhynchus anatinus,_ it reads. There’s soft, confused amusement resting on Liam’s bottom lip as he sends back a series of question marks. He bites at it to keep it from morphing into a smile.

“A picture of bones?” Louis snorts. “’S practically a love letter coming from him, innit.”

Liam’s jaw tightens. “Detecting a bit of a tone.”

The quick reply buzzes through. _It_ _’s a platypus. Venomous -and- good for a cuddle._

“Nah,” Louis says, “you know everyone is cool with Zed.” He takes a sip of his pint, eyebrows expressive as his eyes cast around the table. “He’s just very…”

“Yeah?” Liam goads, eyes sardonically wide as his tone drops. “Very…?”

The tension crackles through the booth, makes Harry and Niall fall quiet as Liam stares Louis down.

Louis scratches at his neck, eyebrows quirking at whatever comment he’s barely withholding. There’s something flaring in Liam’s spinal column.

“Very _interesting,_ ” Louis says, smirk verging on mean like he can’t help it.

A tiny flinch jolts Harry’s broad frame when Liam slams his pint down. “You planning on telling me what your fucking issue is or are we gonna keep having this problem?”

“Just think it’s fascinating, to be honest, how suddenly adorable you find all this morbid shit,” Louis sneers, “considering your investigation revolves around someone who keeps leaving you bodies paired with _love notes._ ”

Niall, at least, has the sense to shuffle out of the booth quickly so that Liam can fling himself to his feet and glower down at Louis with a proper height advantage. “Sounds a hell of a lot like you’re implying something, Tommo.”

There are people staring, poorly-concealed interest from every corner of the pub. Liam can’t even bring himself to care.

He watches as Louis’ tongue licks over his teeth behind closed lips. “Ego’s a bitch, mate,” the pathologist replies, tone the hiss of molten iron submerged.

Harry’s voice is a low warning. “Louis.”

“Fit little lad shows up, not exactly thinking with your upstairs brain, are you?”

“You’re done, Tomlinson.” Liam’s blood rushes in his ears. “Don’t touch my investigation until you’ve sorted yourself.”

He doesn’t wait to hear the retort.

His phone buzzes again when he’s halfway down the block.

_Research adviser rescheduled,_ it reads, _come ruin my night._

Liam’s stomach lurches, sick and hot and heavy.

_Alright,_ he replies anyway.

Another message buzzes through a moment later: _Bring the dog._

Zayn answers the door and leans against the frame with a cocked hip, fresh from a shower. He flicks his still-wet fringe from his eyes, water dripping in rivulets from the raven black of it into the collar of his skate vest. His skin is flushed, glowing like he’s been polished by the shower’s steam, and his legs are clad in trousers tight enough that Liam knows he’ll be fairly peeling them off later.

Loki has no regard for the wicked luminosity in the boy’s eyes, no hesitance whatsoever before he’s sniffing and pawing at Zayn. He jumps up on him until Zayn’s forced to lower a hand and rub at the soft black fur between the dog’s ears, gaze never leaving Liam.

The boy opens with, “You look like shit.”

It’s half an insult. It’s also one of the nicer things Liam’s heard this evening. “You look like you fell off a half-pipe and onto a runway. What’s your point?”

Zayn smirks, some muted version of flattered. He sways back to standing properly and turns, leading Liam into the flat with the curve of his back, the slight sway of his hips.

Liam keeps an eye on his dog as Loki makes with his usual routine, snuffling everything at nose level and clicking across the wood floors with enthusiasm exclusive to canines. “Why’d your adviser cancel, then.”

“Why’d you leave the Met early?” Zayn returns, flopping backwards over the arm of his sofa to land on his back.

“Cut the enigmatic shit.” Liam follows the boy until he’s hovering, one arm keeping him propped above where Zayn sprawls on the couch, thighs pressing into the arm of the couch between Zayn’s dangling legs. “Tell me about your day.”

Zayn licks out over his lip once before speaking. “How much detail,” he hedges, just to be difficult.

He’s fucking impossible. Liam is going to die if he doesn’t kiss him immediately, so he does, self-preservation instincts strong as ever.

“Extensive,” he breathes into the hollow of Zayn’s mouth. He nips once at Zayn’s lip to show he means it before pulling fully away.

“Woke up,” Zayn begins, sarcastically mechanical, “thought about waking you up by sucking you off.”

Liam’s cock twitches, and it’s a likely a lie and definitely a distraction tactic, but damned if it isn’t on the verge of working.

“Didn’t, though,” Zayn continues, “decided it’d be funnier to tell you about it later.” He continues over Liam’s snort. “Showered. Got myself off there so I could tell you about that, too.”

“You’re evil,” Liam interrupts. His hands twitches with the urge to either press it into Zayn’s skin or his own groin.

“Got dressed.” Zayn scratches at his nose, wiggling his shoulders into the couch cushion to get comfortable. “Met you out here for breakfast, which you hadn’t made because you’re useless.”

He’d demanded an egg sandwich before disappearing to his shower, Liam remembers with a tiny smile. “You don’t even have bread, dunno what you expected.”

Zayn continues like Liam hasn’t said anything, big eyes looking around the room in lazy, feigned disinterest. “Forgave you for being useless for what must have been the _thousandth time._ Had cereal.”

“I know these bits,” Liam reminds him. “Was there for them, even.”

“Shut up and _listen,_ ” Zayn demands, nudging him with one of his calves as it dangles over the armrest. Liam grabs it, wraps his hand around the thickest part of it. Keeps it pressed to his side. “Watched you leave. Thought about your arse.”

“My arse,” Liam drawls. It’s surprising still, how casually obscene Zayn can be. There’s a twisted little thrill to pretending to be unaffected for the way it makes Zayn try harder. Like a kid who can’t tell good attention from bad.

“Thought about some asinine project for my molecular neurobiology course,” Zayn says, “then your arse some more, because I could.”

Liam hums an agreeing noise, fingers flexing around Zayn’s leg. His thumb starts massaging idly into the muscle, soothed by the warmth of the coarse fabric.

“Went to lecture,” Zayn continues, “almost set the girl in front of me on fire for talking through it.”

“With what?”

“Nicked a lighter off you.”

“Ah.”

Going on, Zayn says, “Class and class and more class—”

“Did you eat?” Liam asks, squashing a reflexive and completely unnecessary spasm of concern.

“No,” Zayn says. “Got this weird urge for hot water? But not tea. Went with it. That was about it for ingestion.”

He’s so candid about it, the weirdo. “Alright,” Liam allows. He finally gives in to the persistent urge to lean forward and collapse on Zayn, shuffling them until the grumbling boy is next to him on his side. Both sets of legs dangle over the edge of the sofa, tangled lightly. “So class and hot water.”

“Fucked around with some stuff on pathogenesis you wouldn’t understand,” Zayn says idly, meeting Liam’s eyes at close range and stealing his breath in the process. There’s this fleck in Zayn’s left eye, a freckle at the very edge of his iris that stands out against the stark white. Utterly mesmerizing. “Put a platypus together. Took it apart again. Stole a piece to see if anyone would notice.”

“Did they?” Liam asks.

“They did not.” Zayn blinks; Liam spends a microsecond memorizing the exact way light diffuses on his eyelids. “Guess which part it was.”

“Which.”

“ _Guess._ ”

“A vertebra,” Liam hazards.

“Not even close,” Zayn chastises, “it was the mandible.”

Liam spares a thought for the poor, skeletal platypus, cursed to spend the rest of its eternal un-life educating brilliant minds on all but its bottom jaw. “They’ll notice you took it eventually.”

But Zayn is rooting through his pocket, pulling something out, and—oh, yes, that’d be it right there. He calls for the dog, dropping the bone in question to the ground in front of him.

“Don’t—okay,” Liam allows when Loki lays down and happily focuses on the project of gnawing the long, split-end remain.

“Saw my adviser cancelled for ‘personal reasons,’ because she’s weak as _shit._ Texted you,” Zayn continues, “made you come over.”

“You didn’t - _make—_ ”

“Felt, like, _sticky_ from the humidity today and then couldn’t get the lab smell off my skin. Showered again. “

“Get yourself off again?” Liam asks, picturing it. The tuck of Zayn’s full bottom lip under his teeth while his hand works, water sliding down and around the pretty flush of his cock.

“You want me to say yes,” Zayn says with a roll of his eyes. Liam doesn’t miss that it’s not an answer. “Let you in. Started this boring conversation. Gave your dog the aforementioned platypus mandible.”

“That sounds like an indie band.”

“Made you tell me what the fuck happened to have you running away from the Met any time before the usual arse o’clock in the morning,” Zayn finishes, a decibel softer than the rest.

Liam’s heart hurts a little. He throws an arm properly over Zayn, grasping at the soft material of his vest where it clings to his lower back. “It was implied that I get some kind of ego boost from the notes. The killer’s—the notes.” He thinks about Zayn’s perfect lack of reaction when he’d read the photocopies of the note cards over, the look he’d given Liam devoid of pity or remorse or fear. Thinks of his gratitude in that moment. It’s enough to have him breathing deeply and sharing the rest. “It was also implied that you’re the same. For me.”

Zayn’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest where he stares at Liam. “Implied,” he says, even.

“Heavily.”

The boy’s throat bobs. “You get off on the notes?” he asks, a tad raspy. He presses his forehead into Liam’s until his vision unfocuses. “Same way you get off with me?”

Liam shakes his head, eyes fluttering closed. “Don’t get off on anything the way I get off with you.”

He’s past lying about it, has been for weeks. It’s slavish, almost, the way he lets himself be bent to breaking for the boy under his arm. Twisted, maybe. Undoubtedly unhealthy.

Exactly perfect.

“What else did Louis say,” Zayn murmurs, hypnotic and low.

Liam’s brow scrunches, still refusing to open his eyes. “Who said anything about Louis.”

“You.”

“I didn’t,” Liam insists.

“You didn’t, but you did,” Zayn qualifies before continuing. “Did he say it straight out or just—dance around it.”

“I just wish I understood where it’s coming from,” Liam admits, giving up all pretense of secrecy. “He—he’s never been rude to you, has he.” It’s not as though he could do much of anything about it either way. Not sure he’d _need_ to do anything, Zayn’s tongue a blade all its own.

“Louis adoresme,” Zayn says with perfect certainty. “You all do.” There’s a trace of lips near Liam’s ear as Zayn settles in closer, tucking himself very slightly under Liam’s bulk. “Did he call me names?”

“Called you a ‘fit little lad,’ that count?”

Snuffling a laugh, Zayn replies, “No. Though, _little?_ ‘S a bit amusing. Coming from him.”

Liam breathes in, leather and lavender and a hint of a preservative chemical from Zayn’s lab that clings stubbornly under the smell of shower water. Warmth and boy, soap and some pheromone signature he could probably get Zayn to tell him about.

“It was—” Liam bites at the inside of his mouth. They don’t really have talks like this, Zayn and he. “You’re brilliant, so like. You know it’s not like that for me.”

“ _I_ know that,” Zayn says, “you wear your brain on your fucking sleeve, so.”

Liam frowns, brow furrowing as he burrows into Zayn’s warmth. His arm tightens slightly around him, hitching him up until he’s got a good angle on his collarbone and can feel it under his mouth. Skim it with his teeth.

“So Louis was a miserable twat and it was enough to make you leave early?” Zayn asks, seemingly unaffected by the action.

Liam groans. “You’re being so _strange._ ” Concerned. Indulgent. _Normal,_ Liam’s brain offers distastefully.

Zayn goes weirdly rigid for a disquieting second. “What do you want instead?” he asks, blank.

Eyes fluttering open and tickling the skin of Zayn’s neck, the detective thinks on it. “Do you think it upsets my sense of rationality? My—attraction to you.”

“The way your left hemisphere analyzes is completely separate from the way your rostromedial prefrontal cortex decided to be stupid about me.” This, delivered in the same tone _water is wet_ might be.  

Liam takes a second to parse it. “Trying to decide if you’re making stuff up to fuck with me.”

“I’m saying it doesn’t affect it, Liam, not when it comes to your _job._ You’ve been there for years, no one is going to turn you into an idiot overnight.”

“Made me enough of an idiot to let you into that case file,” Liam mumbles into his neck, “dick.”

Zayn doesn’t answer, only brings a hand up to stroke the recently-shorn hair at the back of Liam’s head. “Get off,” he demands after a moment.

Liam sucks a short kiss into the base of Zayn’s neck and complies, watching Zayn float to the loo, door open wide as he flits around at the sink.

He feels better, a bit. Mostly he feels _settled,_ soothed by the particular chill of Zayn’s logic, his biting words and playful venom.

It doesn’t solve anything, though.

Tomlinson had essentially called him twisted, hadn’t he, wrapped up in Zayn’s morbid brand of affection the same way he’s wrapped up in the obsessive search for the person writing him love notes and leaving him morbid displays of affection.

The bitch of it is that he can _see_ where the pathologist is coming from, the cut-glass angle of his unflattering view. No easy explanation exists for why Liam feels the way he does about Zayn—enamored and exhausted and protective and possessive, fascinated and fond and so turned on sometimes he can’t breathe.

No easy explanation exists for why he’s let this murder investigation become his life, either, consume his mind like neurotoxin.

And it’s all just obsession, isn’t it, something he could pin Zayn down and have him explain between one kiss and the next. The crystal-clear science of it. The wine-dark implication.

For all he can presume about the killer—likely a white male, likely between ages twenty and thirty-five, likely with a long history of arson or cruelty to animals, if not outright aggression toward other people—he’s only now finding some piece of himself he can identify in them. Chilling, but: there’s a desire prickling under Liam’s skin of late, something gruesome and self-destructive and aching.

Something that urges him to rip his heart from its cavity, dripping and raw, offer it in his fist. _A token of my affections._

He’s lost in the imagined dark burning look on Zayn’s face, how well he’d wear his imperious amusement if Liam could pull it off for real. The shine of triumph in his eyes.

For that alone, it might be worth it.

“Stop thinking about it,” Zayn calls from the doorway of his bedroom. Liam startles, darting his gaze from where it’d zoned out on Loki under the window gnawing on the mandible.

“Thinking about what,” Liam evades.

Zayn is watching him with something like derision, eyes catching the glow from the bathroom light he has yet to flick off. He’s taken out his contacts, swapped them for his massive glasses, and he’s fetched a notebook from his room. It hangs from his hand, his fingers splayed on its pages thick with notes and charts and what appear to be gruesome little doodles, when Liam looks closely.

Liam hears the boy’s reply through a layer of adoration, thick like static. “The investigation. Obviously.”

“For all you know I was thinking about you,” Liam counters. It’s half true, anyway.

But one of Zayn’s thick eyebrows quirks in derision as he shakes his head. “Nnn, no,” he says. “No, you get this—look, when you’re thinking about me.”

Liam sits up properly on the sofa, eyes never leaving Zayn; why should they? “What _look._ ”

It might bother Liam, the way Zayn bites at his lip and lets is slide slowly from his mouth wet with spit—the way he’s _clearly_ not going to answer—if he hadn’t expected as much.

“Impossible,” he says to himself.

An hour later, Zayn’s skimming lecture notes with his feet buried under Liam’s thigh for warmth while the man peruses his own paperwork. He can leave the Yard for the day, can text Horan and wrest control to him, but he can’t, actually, escape his casework, the dull throbbing reminder of the nine bodies he needs to make someone accountable for.

Cabello’s writing her report on the interview with the informant, apparently, so at least there’s something definitive Liam can focus on besides Louis’ insidious jokes and barbed concern.

Years in, he’d forgotten how little fun it is to be on the man’s bad side. It burns.

“But really,” Zayn says quietly, eyes never leaving a carefully-sketched diagram of— _something_ microcellular. “Louis can keep being wrong. It’s not a factor.”

Liam turns his head, examining the nonchalant fold of Zayn’s body, the contrast of ink and skin on his wrist when he writes something in a margin. He almost says something, _how can you read my mind_ or _you_ _’re the only thing I feel anymore_ or even _thank you._

Ever dutiful, he swallows it back. He can’t quite get his stare to disengage, can’t give up the view of Zayn’s sharp angles oriented toward his class work, determinedly casual.

He’s glad he didn’t when Zayn looks up and affixes Liam’s gaze to his own. “I want to show you something.”

Already closing his notebook and standing, Zayn stretches for a moment before indicating his head and walking away. Liam scrambles up from beneath the clutter of the file and follows.

The flat isn’t large; it takes only a moment for Liam to realize they’re headed toward the room he’d stumbled into the first night he’d been here.

For a moment guilt flashes hot between his ears. Zayn has never expressly hidden the existence or purpose of his art room, has actually left the door cracked a few times when Liam’s been over, but he’s never acknowledged it beyond a grunt of _painting_ when asked about its purpose or why he’s covered in dark splatters when he lets Liam into the flat.

He’s certainly never invited Liam in.

Zayn makes no ceremony of it, simply opens the door and strides into the space. When he clicks the light on, Liam is assaulted by the same sense of violence he’d felt when he had peered in the room weeks ago—sharp, unsettling lines and deep reds on the canvases. Gouge marks and tears. Punctures.

Zayn is standing there quietly—Liam would call it _patient,_ if he knew the boy any less—and the detective thinks to actually acknowledge the room.

“You paint in here.”

He grimaces as Zayn remarks, “Always a powerhouse of observation.”

“You paint in here,” Liam retries, “but you don’t—you don’t _show_ me.”

Zayn is quiet again. A quick glance reveals he’s staring at a painting comprised of pinkish, translucent gel formed into stippled ridges across the canvas, unsettling and oddly medical like scarification. He doesn’t look happy or sad or anything at all, really, until Liam notices the tightness in his hand as he runs it through his hair.

Nervous. Zayn is nervous.

He wraps his arms around Zayn’s narrow waist and tows the boy backward into his chest. “Do you know how impressive these are?” he mumbles into the skin behind Zayn’s ear, pressing a series of kisses to the spot to feel him go boneless in his arms. “Is there anything you don’t fucking _excel_ at?”

Zayn’s exhale is a little shivery from something. Possibly relief. Maybe arousal, the way Liam is mouthing at the back of his jaw. Liam has money on it being both. “Don’t particularly excel at sharing,” Zayn owns up.

“But you _did,_ and—you’re actually sort of brilliant with paint, do you know,” Liam tells him, words smudged into Zayn’s neck. “Could be glitter glue and you’d still find a way to impress me, probably. What do you use for the tissue effect? Is it gauze?”

“And liquid latex,” Zayn says idly, loose and pliant in Liam’s arms in a way he usually isn’t unless he’s still on the comedown after sex. “That wasn’t actually what I meant.”

Liam pulls back. Zayn shrugs fully out of his hold and paces away, rifles through a drawer that’s shoved up against the far wall and covered in painting supplies.

He pulls out a sheet of paper. Lets his eyes rake over it once before handing it to Liam wordlessly.

It takes seconds for the detective to process what it is. It takes altogether longer for him to process what it means.

“This is dated nearly three weeks ago,” Liam says slowly, eyes scanning each box in the long table again. _Clear. Clear. Clear._ “Zayn.”

“Yeah,” Zayn agrees impassively.

“You’ve _had_ this.”

“Mhmm.”

Liam finally tears his eyes away from the STI screening results for one Zayn Javadd Malik. “Why am I only seeing this now?” he demands.

Zayn shrugs, unrepentant smirk working its way onto his face as he takes in Liam’s baffled expression. “Thought it might be useful. Was right, clearly.”

“Useful how?” Liam asks, striding forward until he’s got them pressed together again, hand possessive on Zayn’s lower back. A disbelieving laugh bubbles up, edges of it nearly angry. “You’re a maniac. You’ve known you were clean for _weeks_ and you didn’t tell me?”

The boy’s face screws up in distaste in the pale light of the little room. Liam draws back, guarded.

Zayn says, “I—ugh, I’m gonna say something, and I want you to act normal about it.”

Nodding along before he can think it through, Liam asks, “Normal how?”

“Borderline indifferent,” Zayn says decisively. “Like I’ve just—told you to do something, and you’re unimpressed with my ‘attitude’ but still going to do it.” Liam blinks at the succinct read. “You know,” Zayn finishes quietly.

“Okay,” Liam murmurs. He crosses his arms to sell the illusion that he’s anything but completely enamored in this instant, in this room filled with unsettling art and a snippy boy nearly fidgeting out of his skin with vulnerability.

“Right, so.” Zayn slides the paper from Liam’s lax grip, straightening it out and fixing a crease along the side. His eyes don’t leave the page. “I don’t share well. Like, I—Karlie touched you the other night and I wanted to gouge her eyes out and feed them back to her.”

“Karlie’s happily married,” Liam informs him, amused, “to a woman.”

“Like _that_ has to mean anything,” Zayn says sourly, but he continues. “So I don’t—but you have all these stupid fucking _rules_ about safety, and _precaution,_ and—”

Liam thinks he might have some idea where this is going. He tries to crush the bloom of warmth in his chest, keep it from unfurling into every part of him in case he’s wrong.

“I’m not going to share you,” Zayn says quietly. He darts a gaze up, a brief flash of amber. “I’m not kidding, Liam, I refuse to.”

Liam deliberates on telling the boy he hasn’t been sharing him at all, not his time and not his attention and _certainly_ not his body, more nights spent with Zayn tucked against him than not lately, but he’s more interested in seeing where this might go. What corners Zayn might haplessly talk himself into, exercising an emotional range he tends to keep at arm’s distance.

“So it’s a—bargain,” Zayn manages, eyes back on his sheet from the clinic. Liam tries to think of when he might have gone in to get tested. How soon after that first discussion about it. “You can, like. I’m _clean,_ alright, I haven’t _been_ with anyone else since this started, and I’m not going to—but. You have to—it has to only be me, okay?” There’s a hint of the usual haughty insistence under the slight waver of Zayn’s voice. “I played by your dumb rules, so—”

There’s more, probably, loads more Zayn could say to work it around until it sounds like he’s making Liam a deal he’d be an idiot to pass up—not terribly far from the truth, all told—but Liam thinks he gets the picture now, and he’s not convinced he can keep his mouth off Zayn’s anymore.

“You don’t have to share me,” Liam murmurs against the boy’s lips. “Haven’t been.”

“No one else,” Zayn verifies, and he doesn’t sound happy, exactly, but he sounds satisfied _,_ and it does something warm to Liam’s bones.

“Just you, yeah,” Liam coaxes. “Do you. Is this the proper time for me to ask if you’ve thought about labeling this, or.”

“Might’ve done,” Zayn admits, but his eyes are smoky when he looks up at Liam through his lashes. “We’re gonna fuck before we talk about it though.”

A groan tumbles out from Liam’s throat. He slumps until his mouth is on the hot thrum of Zayn’s pulse, tonguing at the frenetic beat of it. “Bossy,” he murmurs.

“You’re so into it,” Zayn breathes back like it’s a bit of a marvel. “You love it when I push you around, don’t you?”

True and untrue. Liam bites hard at Zayn’s neck, like a reminder. “Can think of an exception.”

“Exceptions exist because there are rules for them to defy,” Zayn returns, and God, that shouldn’t make Liam so hot, that self-important tone. He digs his thumbs into Zayn’s hips, grinding into him. He can feel how Zayn getting hard, getting off on the push-pull they call foreplay every bit as much as Liam is. “Get naked already.”

“I’m _getting_ to it,” Liam bites out on a grin that feels half-feral. “Most impatient person I’ve ever met, you.” He pulls Zayn out of the room by a belt loop, tugging him along through the flat.

When he’s got Zayn spread out on the bed, both of them down to only their pants, Liam toys with the idea of taking his time. Kissing from Zayn’s ankles to the crease of his thigh and sucking a mark into the sensitive skin. Grinding their cocks together for a bit to watch the way frustration and want would build between Zayn’s eyebrows until he’s snappish and flushed with it, veering into incoherency. Flipping him over and tonguing at his entrance, giving him not nearly the type of friction he wants until he’s pulling at Liam’s hair and doing his approximation of begging.

But it’s not just Zayn dying for that closeness, is it. “How do you want it, babe,” Liam rasps out, pulling away to fumble for the lube in the drawer. “First time we do this, how do you want it.”

Liam could take it a lot of directions, personally—could haul Zayn up onto his knees and lean him back into his chest to feel the hammering of his pulse when Liam starts thrusting, could straddle him and ride his cock with his wrists pinned above his head, wicked delight in the boy’s eyes when there’s no give at all, could pin him against the wall and feel Zayn’s nails in his back as his hips push him up the wall and his face breaks open between one thrust and the next—but he saw the quake in Zayn’s hand, the stumbling cadence of his usually polished speech. The pained look in his eyes at the mere notion of being left so open.

Liam saw what it cost him, to give this.

“Can we…” Zayn peers up at him from that fringe of impossible lashes, mouth twisting as he thinks over his words. “Wanna be able to watch you,” he says, a touch quieter, “wanna see your face, like. When you do it.”

Dick throbbing, Liam nods slowly and swallows against his suddenly dry throat. “C’mere.” He lowers himself until he’s hovering over Zayn, one hand gently scooping the back of the boy’s head so that he can kiss him at a better angle, hot and slick and slow.

“You’re kind of,” he murmurs when they break apart, “very, very—”

A shrill mobile tone rings out, tearing at the bubble of unexpected tenderness. Zayn makes a face, annoyed until he sees Liam’s own irritation and the look morphs into muted delight.

“Gonna get that, Detective Inspector?” he asks. His hand traces down his own chest to adjust himself in his pants, taunting.

The tone means it’s Horan, and it wouldn’t be Horan if it wasn’t important.

“I—yeah,” Liam sighs, defeated. His greeting is a bit gruff when he thumbs across the green button on the screen. “Niall.”

“Detective,” Horan returns. Sound filters in from the background, familiar voices and the rush of traffic. “We need you at a scene. We have another body.”

Very suddenly, Liam is submerged in ice. “Location,” he asks mechanically. Zayn is giving him a weird look. He can probably hear Horan through the phone, propped on his elbows, eyes fixed on Liam’s.

Horan rattles off the address. Liam watches the pale echo of his own alarm on Zayn’s face, light reflected off the moon.

He’s got his trousers back on, grappling for his shirt, when he tells Zayn, “Stay here. I need you—just stay put, alright? Don’t leave the flat.”

Zayn pulls his vest back over his shoulders and watches Liam’s borderline frantic movements silently.

Cutting out into the living area, Liam casts his glance about for his rucksack, his case folder. Loki looks up from where he’s laying, watches Zayn trail in Liam’s wake. “You and the puppy, just—hang out, do your homework, don’t—”

“I’ll stay with the dog, Li, Jesus,” Zayn says. “Don’t give yourself an aneurysm, maybe.”

Liam stuffs the folder back into his bag, looking up to where Zayn stands by the window. Alternate flashes of red and blue pour through the dark window behind him, lighting him up in shades of peril. It’s briefly a question of whether Liam will be sick before he makes it to the scene.

Not exactly a long trip, one floor down.

“Promise you’ll stay here,” Liam demands.

Zayn’s expression darkens. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Liam feels his pulse in his ears. “Zayn.  _Non-negotiable."_

The boy snarls something in Urdu under his breath. “Of course I’m gonna stay here, Liam, don’t be so _fucking_ irrational,” he says. “And don’t tell me what to do. I’m not slow.”

Garbling a frustrated noise, Liam paces forward to smash his mouth to Zayn’s. “Please stay safe,” he mutters helplessly.

The student only looks irritated when Liam pulls away. “I don’t understand why you’re being so weird suddenly,” he mutters, dark enough to almost eclipse his evident confusion.

Because he does, Liam vaguely processes, look sincerely confused by the change in pace. Distanced from the murder of someone a floor down, callous to the horror of the atrocity.

Something in Liam’s gut signals unease. It’s—unsettling, it’s _really_ unsettling, actually,  Zayn’s indifference, but it’s also the least of Liam’s concerns right now.

“You’re smart,” he placates quickly. “You’re very reasonable. Please watch the dog. Please stay here.”

He’s flying out the door when he thinks to call, “I’ll be back.”

“I know,” Zayn returns flatly, words barely wisping out before the slam of the door.

The floor below is bedlam, a medical crew and Liam’s team running in and out of the flat directly below the one he just left. The detective’s stomach roils as he watches, finding it all too easy to imagine it’s Zayn’s hallway he’s walking down, Zayn’s doorway teeming with forensics specialists.

Horan strides over to him, expression taut like he knows what Liam’s problem is. “Tomlinson and Cabello are inside,” he tells him. “Scene's secure. Jesy’s getting ready to start photographing and Kloss just texted me—the rest of the team is on the way. The vic’s boyfriend is being treated for shock. He found her.”

Not trusting his voice, Liam only gives a brief nod. Pushes through the few tenants who’ve amassed at the edge of the police tape and ducks under it. Horan follows him back into the predictable scene.

The flat is completely different, for all its searing familiarity. A massive TV dominates the wall by the bedroom and the whole thing is done in richer shades than Zayn favors, emerald and sienna he’d never allow in his minimalist space. No line of boots by the door. No Zayn, skulking and morbid and lovely by the sofa.

It’s enough to loosen up Liam’s chest so he can breathe, at least, getting the clear from the lad on decontamination to move further into the space. He strides to where Tomlinson and Cabello are hovering over the body.

“Do we have a lock on time?” he asks quietly, slipping on the blue latex gloves Cabello offers him.

“The boyfriend came home from work half an hour ago, found her then,” Tomlinson replies. Liam doesn’t look up from the body so he can avoid meeting the man’s eye, has no doubt the pathologist is doing the same. “Time of death looks to be between three and four hours ago.”

When they were arguing in the pub, then. Wonderful.

Liam swears, catches the nod of agreement from his teammates. “Okay, uh. Standard protocol, then. Make sure whoever conducts the interview with the boyfriend bumps it along to me.”

So it begins. Since they have an identity for the victim already, Liam is free to examine the area immediately surrounding the body, see if they can tell the exact way she was dragged into the flat from—wherever it is the murderer is conducting their business these days, with the fishing boat burnt out and held in vehicular evidence.

He grudgingly comes to the heart—wrapped in twine, as usual, still sticky with freshly coagulated blood—and the note, the hateful little square of white that never gives him anything but nightmares.

Tomlinson works silently on his own parcels of evidence, methodically wrapping the hands and hair of the glassy-eyed woman as he goes, wrists mere centimeters from the horrendous bisection of her chest. His eyes flicker up as Liam takes the note with reluctant fingers.

Whatever he sees on Liam’s face is enough to break the ice in his eyes, concern pouring through. “Liam.”

The detective is distantly aware of this, of Tomlinson’s voice and Nelson’s clicking camera, Horan debriefing Kloss and Delevingne.

None of it’s enough. No outside force could be enough to push through the rushing of blood in his brain, swimmy and debilitating.

Through the paralyzing fear, he watches Tomlinson pry the note from his hands.

A beat of silence between them as he reads it over once, twice, again.

“How do they know about him,” Liam manages, voice strained when it works its way around the urge to scream lodged dead-center in his chest.

He wonders if there’ll ever be a time the careful, awful words won’t burn in his mind, haunt his waking minutes and douse his sleeping hours in kerosene. Hold a match to his nerves.

_In dedication to Zayn Malik, boy genius._

  

When Liam walks back into Zayn’s flat three hours later, haggard and exhausted from jittering through the entirety of processing the scene, he strides to the couch and straddles the boy, burying his face in his neck wordlessly.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Zayn chants into his hair, hands coming up to rub over his back like that’ll encourage him to describe the scene faster.

Like an excited kid. _Boy genius,_ Liam thinks, body hurting with it.

“Did they keep consistent, like, were the incisions still—your eyes are all red, why are your eyes red,” Zayn mutters, examining Liam’s face when he pulls back.

Liam needs to tell him about the note. The note, and what it means, and how being properly targeted by a serial killer is going to call for some rather official interviews, and that Liam is so terribly sorry for having dragged him into this. Risked his well-being for some selfish excuse to have Zayn near him on late nights, in his arms after hours of pouring over hideous photos that evidence nothing but humanity’s darkness.

The words keep sticking, though, cold lead in the back of his throat. He lets his bloodshot gaze fall to Zayn’s mouth, the confused part of his lips.

“Liam,” Zayn says.  “Babe, it’s just a body. It’s not even the _first_ body. Don’t fall apart on me. Literally _on me,_ man.”

Liam bites at his own lip to keep it from its disloyal tremble. It stings, the unsympathetic set to Zayn’s expression, his abrasive tone. Even if he has no way to fully understand, to know that Liam is bleeding internally out of guilt and fear for him,it’s not as though Liam’s just returned from a carnival.

“Give me a minute,” he manages. “I—it was a lot, okay. This job—it’s a lot.”

Zayn makes a noise of frustration, thumps his fists lightly against Liam’s chest. “Cool, that sucks, now. _Tell me_ about it? I’ve been dying for details for hours, now.”

“Fuck you,” Liam breathes, low and bitter as his eyes close. He’s still poised over Zayn’s frame, knees on either side of his hips, but it feels like there’s no warmth radiating from the boy underneath him. “You’ve no clue—you like to play detective, sit at my desk and look over evidence like it means a fucking thing to you—but you don’t have the _slightest grasp_ of what the toll of all that evidence _is._ That body was a _person,_ Zayn, do you get that?”

It’s rolling out now, coiled lightning unloaded into the closest receptive body. “It’s all just academic to you, isn’t it? Not real. Is—is _anything_ real for you? You steal, and you fight, you taunt me until I pin you down and fuck you, you take and take and _take_ and the second I need a _minute_ to breathe, to—to _process,_ you can’t give me that?” Liam’s eyes are stinging again, overwhelmed by anger and panic and the welling of fresh guilt as he sees Zayn’s uncertainty. The way he draws his hands back from Liam’s body like he might scald, tries to push himself further into the couch where Liam has him pinned so that they aren’t touching.

He’s making himself smaller, and it’s either conscious or unconscious but either way it looks wrong. Feels _wrong,_ seeing Zayn made lesser by his words.

“Fuck,” Liam sobs out. “God, no, forget I—”

Some distanced part of him can appreciate that this is apparently his breaking point, yelling at Zayn after a day that’s been ruled by different shades of concern for the boy. Attacks from all angles—Louis’ insinuations, a murderer’s _dedication—_ and then his own accusations piled right on top of the mountain of shit Zayn doesn’t even realize he’s standing under yet.

So he presses into Zayn’s neck while his shoulders tremble, feels the coarse heat of tears building and spilling and building again.

Zayn is stiff for a moment, likely suffering whiplash from the quick emotional turnaround. Then, “You’re really fucked up over this case, aren’t you,” he murmurs, hands coming up to clasp around Liam’s waist and pull him closer. “Okay, just. You’re okay. Liam. You’re okay.”

His tone isn’t particularly soothing, but his voice is soft. It’s enough that Liam’s calmed, helped along by the small caresses of Zayn’s thumbs at the bottom of his spine, the huff of his breath at the juncture of Liam’s neck and collarbone.

The boy murmurs variations on _you_ _’re fine_ and _it_ _’s alright_ until Liam’s over the worst of it. He pulls back from Zayn’s dampened neck, wipes at the tears that straggle with the heels of his hands.

“Was that something you wanted to talk about, then,” Zayn asks, dark eyes searching.

Liam lets out a strangled laugh. “No. Fuck, sorry.”

Zayn shrugs. “As long as you’ll still tell me about the scene.”

And it’s—easier, now that he’s dealt with the emotional component, for Liam to look at Zayn’s interest clinically. “You’ll just get someone else to tell you if I don’t,” he mutters, “won’t you?”

“Might just go downstairs to see,” Zayn admits. “Not exactly _far,_ is it.”

“Scene’s already cleaned up,” Liam informs him with a clogged voice, imagining Zayn in the ratty plaid pajama bottoms he favors creeping down the hall to the crime scene. Finding the room cleared out, bitter disappointment on his sleep-rumpled face at being thwarted. “We don’t just leave bodies laying about, you realize.”

Zayn scowls a bit. “On you to catch me up, then.”

“Santa isn’t real, also.”

“Liam.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Liam says, lips twitching at the unimpressed slant to Zayn’s brow, “that was it. Uh. Listen.” He swallows the feeling of spent tears, allowing himself to settle more fully into the boy’s lap. “There’s—your name came up. At the scene.”

With a scoff, Zayn says, “Do your pathologist and I need to _fight?_ What’s—”

Liam shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t. Wasn’t anyone, uh. There.”

And he tells him, and Zayn’s face remains impassive, but he’s not really there the rest of the night, either. Eyes distant. Mind elsewhere.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Is it really an invasion, though? Just reading a label. Just a small piece of information, as integral and inconsequential as how Zayn takes his tea._   
> 
> 
> _Just so that Liam can sleep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yo. So this chapter is literally entirely just Ziam doing stuff. I mean, plot happens, but if it seems like there aren't any other characters present, it's because there aren't. Did I do it intentionally?? Did I somehow end up overbalancing this chapter??? The world may never know.  
> 
> 
> Many many thanks to Monica, who remains The Bestest, and to all of you who have said such lovely things. They've been hugely motivational, thank you so much for taking interest in this story. It means the world. 
> 
> **Massive shout-out to Kayla for this freaky and awesome[TKT vid](http://wellingtonmp3.tumblr.com/post/134719040413/video-tw-bloodslight-gore-the-killing-type). You're a star, Kayla, a gold fucking star. (Warning: blood/slight gore in that vid.)**  
> 
> 
> If you wanna ask questions or talk about whatever, find me at protagonist-m on tumblr.  
> 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy.

The audio recording’s background is filled in with spoons clinking on porcelain, an espresso machine’s hiss. Constant chatter of other patrons in the little cafe. Nearly soothing, like most metropolitan white noise.

Would be, anyway, if the conversation taking place in the foreground was about something other than arson.

“How is it that you came to know about the gang,” comes Cabello’s voice, smooth and professional and gently coaxing.

The man’s voice is rich and deep, proper radio-friendly. It doesn’t make the words less hesitant. “Well. You see, they always come around the wharf at the same time. But it’s not—it’s not a nightly thing. I only noticed there was a pattern after the first time I caught them at it.”

“It,” Cabello prompts.

“They burn things,” says the man. “It was, when I first saw it they were just standing around a car, right, and it was burning.” A pause, bewildered or perturbed. “They didn’t move. They just watched.”

“Did you see any of them with accelerants? Lighters?” Cabello pauses, then tacks on, “Anything suggesting they themselves lit the car on fire.”

“Not—that night, no.” The dull thunk of a mug being placed back on the table. “But uh. I kept an eye out after that. I take the late shift a lot, gives me the chance to walk the girls home from school and that—so I just. Waited.”

“And then you noticed the pattern,” Cabello surmises. Her voice echoes in her cup, precedes a noisy slurp.

“Saw ‘em later that same month, yeah.” A deep exhale. “They were still setting it up, that time.”

“Did they see you?”

“No, no. It was after—I got bumped from patrol to cams, y’know, when they restructured security. It was after that, when I was sitting in the little kiosk, checking the cameras. I’d been told we turn them off certain days for a software refresh, right. Only when I go to turn it off, there’s those lads again.”

“I see.” Cabello’s voice is little more stringent, a little more professional as she says, “And what did you see them do?”

“Took a—looked like a writing desk, really old school, you know. They doused it in something and one of them took his fag and threw it on top. They just watched it go, same as the car.”

“Alright.” A beat. “And you figure you have the schedule pinned down?”

“It’s when we do the software refresh, yeah.” Lower, more rueful, “If that’s even a real thing.”

“Could be,” Cabello says agreeably.

The _It probably isn_ _’t, though,_ is lost in the flurry of movement as something yellow flies at Liam’s face.

He smacks it away mid-air, somehow dislodging one earbud in the process. “May I help you?”

“Looked all spacey,” Zayn says, eyes back on his easel and the canvas where sinewy, raw muscle tissue is taking shape. “Wanted to make sure you were still functional.”

Wanted attention, more like. Liam picks up the coarse little yellow painter’s sponge and flings it back toward Zayn. He does nothing to deflect it. Just lets it bounce harmlessly off his shoulder, eyes on the long strokes of his brush.

“I’m alive.” Liam massages the side of his face, the spot behind his jaw. “Annoyed but alive.”

Zayn makes a tutting noise, trading out his brush. There’s white paint covering most of his ring finger. “If that’s all it takes to annoy you then I have some bad news.”

“Wh—no, not you.” Liam shoves his earbuds into his pocket, closing the recording. Probably it doesn’t need a twenty-third listen. “This arson thing.”

“Oh.” The boy pauses, brush glistening mean pink where it’s suspended halfway to the canvas. “What’s annoying about arson, then.”

The detective sprawls his legs out on the floor, pulling his shoulders away from the wall in a stretch. “Besides how it destroys evidence?” He rotates his neck on his shoulders, groaning low at the pang it doesn’t quite alleviate. It’s been a week since victim ten was found; everything aches. “Besides how it’s a crime?”

“Parking badly is also a crime.” There’s a small metal hook that looks vaguely dental in Zayn’s hand, now. He begins scraping at a layer of paint near the top of the canvas.

Liam watches the careful press of the hook as he retorts, “Not a crime that costs lives, though.”

“Maybe if you parked really _very_ badly,” Zayn says, still making those careful slices into the paint.

The detective smiles, unsurprised to find himself lacking the energy required to make it meet his eyes.

For all that the team has kept it professional since the note naming Zayn, for all that Kloss’ _this time, it_ _’s personal_ joke had wrung a splintered, brittle laugh from Liam’s lungs (for all he’s self-medicated with enough cigarettes that Zayn’s eschewed greeting him for rifling through his bag and destroying the damn things whenever he finds them), there’s no denying the toll the simple card stock has taken on the detective.

In an act of what Liam is too cynical to call anything but self-preservation, the team collectively kept mum on Zayn’s previous involvement with the department.  After he’d exited his one-on-one with Winston—who, shockingly, didn’t take well to the boy that had gone on record to state he was _getting off with one of your detectives, sir, it_ _’s not terribly complicated_ —they had breathed something of a collective sigh of relief that it was through and proceeded to close ranks even further, office practically soundproofed for how insulated it is.

Someone’s targeting their boys, after all, threats masquerading as ardent dedications. Liam has the training and the record to prove he can handle it— _will_ handle it, when the time comes.

Zayn, though.

He tries to bury his worry under the sound of his voice. “It’s annoying because it’s set us back,” Liam says. “We can’t ever really afford that. We _really_ can’t afford it right now.” Breathed out with a sigh as his head falls back against the wall, “Can’t afford it with this.”

“Mm.” Zayn sets the hook on a little cart full of supplies that seem random but become significant, the detective has found, under his hands. He turns and hunches down until he’s crouched in front of Liam, eyes studying the heavy irritation pulling at his brow, the worried pinch of his mouth. He leans forward until he tips into his lap, jostling with his sharp elbows until he’s turned around, sitting with his head leaned back against Liam’s shoulder. Narrow fingers reach up and push into the muscle at the top of Liam’s spine, easing out the knots of tension with focused circles.

Liam breathes in the smell of Zayn’s shampoo. It’s prominent right now, without any of the usual product worked into the strands. His hands come up to rest on the boy’s sides, mimicking the slow movement of Zayn’s fingers on his neck with his thumbs.

“Arsonists are gonna be at that wharf,” Liam tells him, “last Thursday of the month.”

“That’s tomorrow, Li.”

“ _Is_ it.” Sarcasm saturates the rumbled syllables. They get lost in Zayn’s hair where Liam has his mouth pressed.

Zayn’s fingers move from Liam’s neck, “What’re you going to do about it?”

Liam knows. Has known since the initial meeting with Cabello and the rest of the team, knew before he’d finished listening through the recording the first time.

“Gonna change the topic,” he tells Zayn, adjusting him slightly in his lap. “Real abruptly.”

Wiggling out of his grip long enough to turn around, Zayn straddles him properly. Runs a finger along the tips of his ears. “You have paint in your hair.”

Liam’s eyes fall closed. “And whose fault is that,” he mutters into Zayn’s mouth.

 

He brings him on the stakeout the next night.

It’s inadvisable—more than that, really, has Liam’s nerves screaming about protocol and unsanctionable action—but it’s also the only way the detective could soothe his nerves long enough to pull _off_ a stakeout, able to focus without nagging concern for a boy who’s haplessly caught a killer’s attention.

Said boy speaks into the silence, quiet and familiar. “He give you any shit today?”

Mostly, it feels like a matter of course to evade it. “Winston? Not really, just sort of existed for a little while then disappeared. Like he does.”

“You know I meant—”

“Niall, right,” Liam cuts in. “No, but he gave me some of his gyro, _that_ was a highlight.” He lolls his head to the side, shooting Zayn an indolent smile.

There’s exasperation Zayn is working very, very hard to keep from showing on his face. Liam is quietly delighted. “Li.”

The detective breathes out a laugh. “No, mum, the big mean pathologist didn’t bully me today.”

“Okay. Good.” Zayn turns to face him a little more. “Was that _so_ hard?”

Liam turns his attention back to the windshield, the dark wharf into whose shadows they’ve tucked the unmarked sedan. “Yes.”

“Twat.”

It’s agreeably silent for a bit until Zayn decides he can’t be having anymore of that.

“This seems better in movies,” he says, propping his feet on the dash. “More action-packed.”

“Most things are better in movies.” Liam shoots him a glance from the driver’s side. Takes a moment to enjoy the look of Zayn packed into one of his hoodies, soft where it brushes the clean shave of his jaw. “Do you know what a stakeout even is?”

“A lot of sitting, apparently.” Zayn shifts a bit and stretches. “Might’ve stayed home, had I known.”

As if Liam had given him a choice. As if Liam has given him anything but the absolute minimum breathing room for things like classes and showers since the note naming him.

Well. Some of his showers, anyway.

“Nah. You’re a sucker for intrigue,” Liam replies, “you wouldn’t have missed this.”

 _This_ being the wharf favored by the arson gang. It’s late enough that no employees are smoking out near the water. No security personnel prowl the pier. The cameras, if Cabello’s informant is correct, aren’t even on right now—the only sign this place is active at all comes from the orange cast of the tall streetlights hovering at every corner, casting shadows in double.

They’ve been here a while.

“What, missed all this _sitting?_ ” Zayn plays at a fray in his trousers, the holey ones that leave his knees exposed. He thunks his head dully against the window of the passenger side, casting a glance out through the tinted window. “No, you’re right, it’s dead interesting.”

Liam rubs at his five o’clock shadow. Surveys the surrounding juncture of shipping containers and alleys—impossible to avoid passing through when one enters the little wharf. “It could be.”

“Think I saw a rat earlier, even,” Zayn quips.

“Ah, see? You’re already more useful than me.”

“Can think of a few ways you could be use—”

“Wait, shut up.”

“Fuck o—”

“No, seriously, shut up.” Liam brings a hand to Zayn’s chest to ease him back into his seat and urge him away from any sudden movements.

A group of figures have appeared on the opposite side of the lot they’ve parked at the edge of, jostling each other as they move. They stride predatory and cocky in their oversized shoes, self-assured the way only groups of young men ever are.

“Thank God,” Zayn mutters, “something’s actually happening.”

They watch the boys round the corner of a shipping container and hear the harsh, ringing laughter of one near the front, muted through the windows of the car.

“Stop,” Liam rebukes when he notices Zayn’s hand sliding toward the door handle. “This part I do.”

Zayn makes a deeply unimpressed noise, hand flopping back to his lap. “ _Liam,_ ” he whines.

“Think of ways I can make it up to you when I get back, yeah?” Liam says absently, watching the last lad turn the corner and disappear from sight.

The boy huffs but doesn’t disagree, just angles his body to lean more fully against the door as he drums his fingers.

Liam will have to worry about Zayn being stroppy later. “Lock up after I get out,” he murmurs, easing the door open as quietly as possible. “Stay put. Be _quiet._ ”

With a glower, Zayn grudgingly hits the lock button once Liam’s eased his door shut behind him. The detective makes a kissy face through the glass just to see Zayn roll his eyes before mirroring the action, fully petulant.

Then he turns and starts walking toward the boisterous cackles coming from the opposite side of the lot. He plays at the zipper on the bottom of his jacket while he walks, rounding out each step in his trainers to make less noise over the gritty asphalt.

The boys are as Cabello’s informant described them: clad in clothing three sizes too large, speech loud and feral and slurred from alcohol. Wearing obstinate expressions on their pasty faces which always bring Liam to an inexplicable comparison to toes, fat and piggy and dull.

They’re cackling among themselves when he turns the corner, oblivious to anything but themselves. “Evening, lads.”

A midsize fellow with hair the color of wet cardboard twists to watch Liam emerge from under a streetlamp. “The fuck are _you?_ ”

Liam exaggerates an unconcerned frown, waving his hand dismissively. “Just had a quick question about some work of yours a few weeks back.”

The others are crowding around, shifting to stand behind Wet Cardboard in a way Liam’s sure is properly intimidating to some. He catches the woozy sway a few of them are throwing off, the over-dilation of several pairs of eyes. He can smell malt liquor and he can guess well enough what else they might be on.

“Granddad thinks he knows our work, then?” Cardboard jeers, like it’s funny. His hyenas seem to find it amusing enough, laughing dark and mean where they rustle into each other, almost seeming to sway with the wind off the river.

“Know a bit more than that,” Liam says. He scratches idly at his hip above the denim of his jeans. “Not interested in kicking up a fuss about it if you aren’t.”

“Aw, he _knows_ stuff,” Cardboard coos through his thick accent. Liam tries for a moment to place it before deciding it’s largely artificial. “Y’know how to piss off and steer clear, then?”

The words strike Liam, oddly, as the gutter version of Zayn’s evasion. It’s not nearly as effective. “Lemme have a word with you for a moment, yeah,” he coaxes in an undertone, “see if we can’t find a way to make some easy info worth it for you.”

He could pull out his badge, make this all happen very quickly. There’s no doubt in Liam’s mind that at least one of these boys has a few grams of something they’d rather get violent than disclose to an officer of the law, though, so he’s willing to compromise.

If only just.

“What’ve you got you suppose I might find worth it, then,” Cardboard wonders aloud.

Pitched for only the two of them, Liam says, “A tip that’s gonna keep you lot out of jail, if you think you might be willing to answer a question for me.”

Cardboard licks his lips, thinking it over. He has rather startlingly gray eyes, pale in the orange of the streetlamp. “Who’re you running with?” he asks. “This a favor to Pete?”

Liam smiles a little without warmth or malice. “You up for an exchange of information, or am I wasting my time?”

“Sure,” says Cardboard. “You go first.”

Fair enough, Liam thinks, even as he says, “Look, mate, I’m trying to do you a courtesy. Either you give me what I need or I find someone else and you risk being the man responsible for these lads here ending up behind bars.”

There’s some low grumbling from the lads in question. Liam doesn’t pay it any mind. A long, loud exhale that has a few of Cardboard’s boys milling about behind him, spoiling for any form of action.

“Alright then, granddad,” Cardboard says finally. “What’s it you’re after?”

Sorted, then. Liam motions with his head for them to step slightly back and away from the group, into the shadow of a shipping container. He doesn’t miss the cagey glances from the rest of the boys, the way they square their shoulders like they’re preparing to spill a bit of blood.

It won’t come to that; Liam is excellent at his job. He doesn’t have to think back all that far to remember a time before his career in homicide, spending nights working vice.

Granted, he once nearly had his wrist snapped by a fellow on PCP, but he never _really_ lost control of a situation.

Was his left wrist, anyway.

“You had a project a while ago,” Liam starts when they’re out of easy earshot from the little gang. He slips a cigarette from its case, lips it straight into his mouth. Offers one to Cardboard, who takes it after a moment of deliberation. “I’m guessing you have your own light,” he says, brow quirking.

Cardboard inclines his chin upward in acknowledgment, cocky. “Me and the lads have quite a few projects.” He pulls out a Zippo customized with a gaudy, stylized _G_. The flame of it casts his face in dirty shadow for a moment before flickering back out. “In high demand, you see. Due to our level of expertise.” He hollows his cheeks, breathes in. “Might need to be a bit more specific.”

Liam runs his tongue along the roof of his mouth. “Fishing boat. Rather boxy. Found burning off that pier.” He tilts his head slightly to indicate and takes a short drag from his cigarette.

Cardboard makes a noise of happy recognition. “The Seablazer,yeah? Might’ve heard about it.”

The shiftiness of the reply is only mildly irritating; this boy has no reason to trust Liam. Some corner of his mind chimes that Zayn would appreciate the equivocation. He eases into the topic. “The Sea _blazer?_ Really?”

“Funny, innit.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“God’s honest truth, mate,” Cardboard says, shoulders relaxing a bit as the ember of his cigarette burns bright on an inhale. “Burned like a—takeaway container or summat, fucking hysterical.”

Liam grunts a little amused noise even as his blood spikes at the memory. “So here’s my question.”

“Shoot.”

“Who put you up to it.”

“Ah ah.” Cardboard shakes his head, smirking. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth. “Afraid that one’s not mine to tell.”

The detective frowns, just a bit. It’s not the end of the road, if the kid refuses to talk, but it makes his job a decent bit harder. “It’s the only question I’ve got,” he says levelly. “Only one I need answered before I can tell you what _I_ know.”

“Yeah, and see, I’d love to do that.” The kid drops the half-spent fag, grinding it out with the heel of his hightop trainer. “Only the Blazer was a bit of a…what would you call it. Outsourcing thing.”

“Outsourcing,” Liam repeats blankly.

“C’mon, granddad,” Cardboard chastises, “’s like when you have someone else do something for—”

“No, I know what outsourcing is,” Liam quickly says. “What do you—”

An uptick in noise runs through the gang, ruffled how a flock of grounded buzzards might be by a snake traveling in their midst.

“Hang on a sec,” Cardboard says, mouth snarling a bit with irritation. “Oi, lads! What’s—?”

The detective’s heart sinks to his stomach; his stomach drops to his toes.

Zayn stands there with his hands stuffed into the front pocket of Liam’s hoodie, all serrated edges under soft cotton.

“What did I say,” Liam says flatly, “about staying in the goddamn _car._ ”

“Hey man, I didn’t sign off on no extra eyes and ears,” Cardboard says quickly, gaze flicking between the two as his expression twists to something distrustful. “You got a crew with you, I suggest you tell me ten minutes ago. Help me make an informed decision, like.”

Liam’s only half listening. Zayn has got his mouth open to explain—spew some shit, more likely—but he’s interrupted by the hissed question from one of the smaller boys in Cardboard’s posse.

The words are quick and low and urgent. One of them is still unmistakably Zayn’s name.

It’s enough to break the stare Liam and Zayn had been maintaining, both whipping around to see where the boy stands. The kid’s younger, or maybe just looks it. He has these wide eyes that signal alarm as easily as a doe’s, baby-soft skin flushing darker when he picks up on the fact that he has the crowd’s attention.

“Zayn, man,” says the boy next to him. He’s one of the lads Liam had pegged earlier for rolling on—something, eyes oddly vacant to match the light slur of his speech, spotty skin looking raw where he’s picked at it. “Didn’t think you’d be in London town.” All delivered in a flat tone that might hint at disbelief, a dull echo of the incredulity flooding Liam’s system. “Thought you’d died, maybe,” he tacks on, wiping at his nose with one imprecise finger.

It’s sheer instinct that keeps Liam from interjecting, demanding answers that ample precedent suggests Zayn won’t give. Instead, he watches Zayn’s face. The perfect static of his blank expression, the amazing nothing behind his gaze.

It’s tense and horrible, the second between the realization that these boys—some of them, anyway, the others shuffling awkwardly through the encounter—know Zayn, and when Zayn actually speaks.

“You’re going to stop talking now, Calvin,” he says quietly, precisely.

Liam finds himself suppressing a shudder. It’s almost—it’s _scary_ ,the way Zayn is looking at the boy. Beautiful features twisted into something menacing beneath the glow of streetlights, terrifying for its subtlety. His eyes remain unusually, horribly devoid of light, like a shadow exists over him that no one else is affected by.

The detective fears he could blink and lose it, the perfect clarity of the image. The figure of Zayn made ghastly in the orange light.

He thinks very suddenly of the small shelf in the office filled with books—largely Niall’s, largely left in the lounge area on long nights. Largely the romantics, Shelley and Brontë and Byron.

He thinks of _Frankenstein_ and all the original monsters.

The smaller boy who had originally spoken elbows Calvin hard when it looks like he’s about to start in again. There’s a pull of tension where the poor sod seems to wobble between following Zayn’s unsettling command and running his mouth further.

For the life of him, Liam can’t decide which he’d prefer.

“Right,” Cardboard interjects finally, stance broad, “this ain’t the sort of trouble we’re after. Take your boy and get gone.”

It’s short and to the point, but it’s also unacceptable. This investigation has gone on too long, had too many vexing stall-outs and _far_ too many bodies for Liam to let anything resembling a lead go just because some greasy chav in a snapback told him to.

His badge is burning in his jacket’s interior pocket, fingers inching up like he might grab it. Get this over with the messy way.

Trust Zayn to thwart his plans.

“And _you_ are going answer his question,” Zayn says, but he’s not talking to Cardboard. His eyes are on the deer-eyed one again.

Who looks to be bricking it. “Zayner,” he breathes, “mate, no, I didn’t—I don’t _know—_ ” He turns terrified eyes to Liam.

The detective garbles out a response, more than willing to take advantage of the dark momentum Zayn seems to have created. “The Seablazer,” he says, “who put you lot up to it?”

“ _Ant,_ ” Cardboard says. It takes Liam a second to realize it’s a warning, not an answer.

But the boy shakes his head and spills it out anyway, messy in whatever panic Zayn seems to incite in him.  “Name is Franklin,” he says on a bit of a tremble, “but I don’t—it’s not, like, I don’t think that’s his real name. And he’s, like, there’s someone _he_ _’s_ working for—”

“Location,” Liam cuts in, wary of Zayn’s edgy presence and the quickly-agitating movements of the gang, put off by the shift in power dynamic. “Where can we find him.”

The boy—Ant,if Liam heard that correctly, if it wasn’t just a grunt on Cardboard’s part—stutters out an address that Liam taps into his mobile without taking his eyes off the tense little grouping for more than half a second at a time.

“Alright, you got what you were asking after,” Cardboard grits out. “Believe there was an exchange of knowledge promised, granddad.”

They could walk away right now, he and Zayn, back to the car and out of this odd, disquieting moment in the dead of night, but there’s already an edge to the atmosphere of it all and the detective isn’t particularly interested in nudging the balance toward violence, incipient and metallic on the back of his tongue.

“Let me tell them,” Zayn says, silvery and swifter than Liam can manage. “The filth know about your little operation.”

A moment of silence. Liam counts his heartbeats. Then, “How’s that,” one boy asks.

Liam knows, the same way he knows the shape of his own fingers, that Zayn is about to tip things out of their favor. He doesn’t have time to properly head it off, press his fingers into the juncture of collarbone and shoulder and keep Zayn _quiet,_ which would be the best option. All he can do is shift his body, tense his muscles. Prepare.

“Oh,” Zayn says, mockingly cheerful in a way that manages to be sinister, “we told them, is all. Cheers lads, have a _fantastic_ ni—”

It’s not surprising to Liam that he sees the knife before Zayn does. It’s a sloppy lunge from some silent bloke on his left, anyway, telegraphing his intention eons before he’s close to piercing flesh.

As if Liam would let him. It’s not a matter of thought to kick the knife straight out of the man’s hand, fists raised to help Liam balance a pivot into a solid punch to the side of Cardboard’s jaw when he finally, inevitably dives toward Zayn.

The others pounce, raucous shouting and the glint of metal pulled from oversized trouser pockets.

Liam isn’t particularly interested to see if any of the rest have the follow-through. They’re at an advantage, on the edge of the circle with no one between them and the sedan. He gets a hand around the fabric at Zayn’s wrist and starts sprinting before the gang can catch onto the idea, the sound of their boots a heavy thud under the yelling as they’re pursued.

“You fucking cocks!” Cardboard yells. There are more shouts, something about them being dead, but Liam is hardly listening, too focused on getting out before this goes very, very wrong. He’s fairly fast on his own and he’s relieved to see that Zayn’s random propensity for self-endangerment doesn’t extend this far. The boy keeps pace, maybe a step behind.

The relief is short-lived; Liam is jerked back suddenly by a hand fisted in the material of his jacket, yanking hard enough to make him stumble. He shoves an elbow back, gratified by the sound of a choked exhale and warmth of the body slumping forward into him enough that he can smell stale smoke before he resumes running.

Seconds spent shoving the heavy body off of him are costly, though. One of the vacant-eyed boys closes in from his right. He has what looks like a Ruger, something small and lethal, finger pushing at the safety.

An instant where the detective judges the distance between Zayn and the car and the boy with the gun.

He stops short, wheeling around to catch the boy in the side with his leg. He hears the exhale punched out of the kid’s lungs, sees his grip on the gun loosen.

It’s what he needs. Liam grapples for his wrist, grip sure, and twists his arm behind his back until the lad shrieks, fingers loose enough for Liam to pry the gun away.

“Cheers,” he says, turning just in time to see a bloke between Zayn and the car.

Completely unmoved, Zayn only stands there with loose posture, fists curling and uncurling idly as the boy advances on him, something flashing metallic in the lad’s hand under the streetlights.

The shot’s loud. It hits a little lower than Liam intended, the bicep instead of the shoulder, but it has the desired effect. The knife the boy was holding clutters to the ground. He follows it a moment later with a pained howl.

Zayn wipes at a smattering of crimson on his neck before stepping over the writhing figure and climbing calmly into the car.

Liam sprints the last few meters, mindful of the pistol in his hand even as he flings himself into the drivers side.

“Safety,” he tells Zayn, passing him the gun. He slams the locks on the doors just as fists begin to pound at the windows.

From the corner of his vision he sees the boy examine it for a moment before finding the lock, sliding it into place. One of Cardboard’s lads is shouting obscenities through the glass, fogging it with his breath. Zayn doesn’t even look up.

Liam gets the engine started, has them peeling out of the lot with smoky screeches following them. Something dings against the bumper, a knife or lighter, likely. There’s a sound of class breaking somewhere behind them. The detective pays it no mind, jaw tight as he takes a corner a little sharply.

Then they’re clear. Liam lets out a long exhale made ragged by the adrenaline still thrumming through his muscles and twitching his fingers on the wheel.

Two streets later, he peeks over at the silent boy in the passenger seat.

Zayn’s face is a little flushed from exertion, fingers shaking slightly when he scratches at an eyebrow. His other hand is still on the gun. When he notices Liam looking, he darts him a glance that flickers back to the window a moment later, mouth a tight, steady line.

Liam feels like his throat is burning, memories of cigarette smoke and hard fists, but also with questions and accusations hot as cinder.

The arsonists knew Zayn. They knew him, and whatever they knew frightened them enough to get nervous, sloppy about secrets.

More damningly, Zayn knew _them._ He’d called the one by name, had spoken to the other with familiarity belying the menacing twist of his features. The emptiness of his eyes.

The detective chances another glance over as they drive in thick silence. Zayn isn’t giving him anything, eyes trained straight ahead and hands limp around the gun. His eyes shine dark in each hit of passing light. They’re maybe a little more dilated than usual from adrenaline, Liam can’t decide in a short look.

“I wanna sleep as soon as we get home,” Zayn surprises him by saying, “so if you’re going to ask—”

“Not,” Liam cuts in, and now he’s just surprising himself. “I’m not asking anything.” A moment of silence. “Tonight,” he modifies.

Zayn scoffs out a sound like a snarl. “Take your time,” he says in a way that’s decidedly not nice.

There’s are splinters under Liam’s skin, fragmented questions he can’t bring together after such a long day. It’s probably not worth the breath to explain his fatigue, with Zayn so obviously on the defensive. So obviously not telling him _something._

“Did they manage to hit you,” he asks instead, concern smoky and bruise-blue in his tone.

Whatever Zayn expected, that wasn’t it. Liam watches out of his peripheral as Zayn’s head whips around to stare at his profile while he navigates the streets.

“No,” he answers quietly. “Saw that one bloke get a hold of you, though.”

Liam nods. “Just for a sec.”

“Worked out alright for you,” Zayn comments. There’s the soft metallic sound of his nail flicking the pistol.

“Put—put that in the glove box, yeah?”

The boy complies, sliding the piece in with some paperwork and a frost scraper. It’s the queerest little olive branch Liam has ever been offered when he says, “You move like a dancer. When you fight, I mean.”

Clicking on the turn signal, Liam feels a gentle smile curving on his face. “I did dance as a kid. And boxing.”

A chuckle, raspy and dry. Zayn adjusts his hands so that they’re soft and open, palm-up in his lap. Liam doesn’t need to look to know the sleeves of his filched hoodie are hanging low over Zayn’s knuckles, making him look smaller. “Saw a bit of that. Earlier.”

Liam drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “When I was a kid,” he says slowly, “I was picked on. Kind of a lot. Rather badly, actually.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything, but his head’s inclined like he’s listening anyway.

“Think it might have been the _fancying blokes_ bit that did it,” Liam muses. “I was, like, fairly athletic. Not a troublemaker. _Nice,_ ” he laughs, quiet and a little bitter still, years on, “for whatever that’s worth. I did choir and plays and sport and I got the absolute _shit_ beat out of me anyway.”

He turns onto the street where he lives. They spend their nights here these days, Liam always hesitant to have Zayn anywhere near the scene that made him a target.

“And I already had this condition—a scarred kidney, you’d probably be able to tell me more about it than I ever knew—so that, when I finally landed in hospital…” Liam thinks back on it, stitches in his shoulder and fractures in his arm and internal bruising that made black light pop behind his eyes if he moved the wrong way for weeks after. The horror on his mum’s face and the sudden comprehension that sometimes, people are just fucking awful. “…I had to learn how to do something about it.”

“Should’ve hurt them _back_ ,” Zayn bites into the darkness, tone petal-soft even as the words seethe, “should’ve—”

He stops, and Liam isn’t so exhausted from this day that he doesn’t recognize the same unease he’d felt at the wharf ripple through him again at the twitch of Zayn’s features. Like he’s pushing something down, or back. Under.

“Maybe,” Liam admits quietly, thoughtfully. It’s easy to be patient with this, a shade of anger he remembers so, so well. Roiling fury he could do nothing for. Feeling broken and helpless and so fucking twisted up at the world and those boys that he imagined, at the time, that he could kill for it. Just to feel the scalding-red thrum of a savage victory in his blood, the headrush of it. Just to feel like it was even, to take away even a quarter of the trust in others they had robbed him of. Liam eases into his parking space with the echo of that manic hatred in his fingertips.

“Instead, though,” he continues levelly, “my sister’s boyfriend taught me to box to defend myself.” He kills the engine, finally turning to look his fill at Zayn in the passenger seat.

There’s something like a war for neutrality taking place on Zayn’s face, the angry, gruesome pinch of his features beaten back by opaque nothingness. Liam watches, frankly fascinated, as Zayn erases the snarl from his lips, the crease from his brow, the wrath from his eyes.

Liam watches the careful architectural process of it. Deliberates on telling Zayn the truth: the boys he knew then likely grew up to be the men they saw tonight. Different faces, different names, different _people,_ but a kindred sense of violence and destruction.

He nearly tells him how sick a part of him feels, knowing Zayn might’ve been just like them once.

Instead, he loops an arm over the boy and breathes him in while they stumble up the landing to Liam’s flat, to Loki’s excited snuffling and the warmth of the bed.

The detective is almost dead asleep, bones heavy and jaw slack, when he’s jostled unpleasantly awake.

“Li,” comes Zayn’s voice from where he’s tucked with Liam curled around him. “Hey.” He scratches lightly over Liam’s thigh again, and that in itself wouldn’t be an unpleasant sensation if Liam wasn’t so fucking _tired._

“Whuzzit,” he mumbles into the back of Zayn’s neck. His head is dizzy and throbbing with how badly he wants to be asleep right now. “What’s up, babe.”

“I left my bag in your car,” Zayn tells him, conversational tone loud enough to pierce the gauzy veil of sleep completely. “I need it. Go get it.” As an afterthought, “Please.”

Liam rumbles out a noise of pitiful, irritated distress. “’M sleeping,” he says. It’s only a bit of a whine. “Get it yourself.”

“What if I’m scared to,” Zayn replies. He settles back more fully against Liam’s chest as if to showcase his fear of the big, bad world.

“You’re not,” Liam mutters, awake enough now to pull his arms back off Zayn’s chest and sit up. His hands miss the feeling of Zayn’s sleep-warm cotton shirt as soon as it’s gone. He rubs at his eyes. “Your bag, you said?”

“Yeah,” Zayn replies quietly. He curls slightly further into himself without Liam pressing up behind him; the way he pulls the blanket up toward his chin has Liam’s chest aching a bit.

He leans down, hand on the headboard to keep his balance while he presses his lips to the thin skin of Zayn’s cheekbone. “Be right back,” he murmurs.

Only a quick cost-benefit analysis has Liam toeing on a pair of slip-ons before he winds out the door. The air is getting properly chilly, this time of year. He resists the urge to wrap his arms around his bare torso to retain heat.

The bag is in the backseat where he remembers seeing it earlier, shoved behind the passenger seat at an angle that’s awkward to get to from his side. Liam squeaks out a strained noise as his fingers graze the edge of the bag, grappling for purchase on the rough canvas.

He finally nudges the rucksack toward him enough to grab more effectively, but he must have underestimated its weight; it slips from his hand, spilling its contents over the floor of the car.

“Fucking hell,” Liam mutters, standing to walk to the other side of the car. Zayn is probably fully asleep now, puffing quiet little breaths over Liam’s pillow as he dozes.

Liam opens the back door on the passenger’s side and starts shoveling Zayn’s things into the rucksack, back past where the leather drawstring had come loose.

He’s digging the last of the pens out from under the front seat when he feels something small and rumpled, sharp thin edges to it. Frowning, the detective grips the slip of paper between two fingers and brings it up to see in the glow of the streetlight.

 _Caroline,_ it reads, _emergencies._

Under that is a phone number. It's all written in a familiar hand.

Liam’s brow furrows. “What the fuck,” he rasps, throat sore with how exhausted he feels, how cold the air is.

He stuffs the post-it in with the rest of Zayn’s stuff, picking the bag up. There’s a moment, when he hoists it over his shoulder as he climbs the stairs, that he thinks he hears the telltale rattle of pills in their obtrusive little bottles.

It’s an effort not to check. More so than the first time, when he’d slammed the cabinet closed as the prescription bottles set off alarms that rang like _invasion of privacy_ in Liam’s skull, it’s an effort.

Is it really an invasion, though? Just reading a label. Just a small piece of information, as integral and inconsequential as how Zayn takes his tea.

Just so that Liam can sleep.

His fingers are inching toward the bag’s opening when he finally catches up with himself.

“Keep it together,” Liam mutters, slinging the bag back over his shoulder and padding back across the threshold of his flat.

Zayn is sitting up in bed, eyes unreadable for how dark it is.

Liam hands him the bag wordlessly, watches as he shuffles to his feet in his threadbare t-shirt and boxers. Watches as he slips into the bathroom, door huffing softly shut behind him.

The boy slips back under Liam’s arm less than a minute later. The detective is left to worry that Zayn will pick up on the hammering of his pulse, the coursing assertion running burgundy in his veins.

 _You_ _’re hiding something from me,_ Liam thinks. It's not the first time.

 

Sleep brings him dreams where gasoline and gunpowder choke his senses. The next morning is groggy and a bit miserable from the first, a headache nestled somewhere between Liam’s brain and nasal passage.

Liam sits on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, elbows on his thighs.

“Am I on my own, then,” Zayn checks, voice soft as he shrugs on his jacket.

It’s Friday, Liam dredges up. Zayn has class until noon.

Then he can come straight back here and answer a few questions—if Liam can, in fact, get himself to put them to order in his dragging brain.

“No, I’ll take you,” he sighs out, swaying to his feet. He’d stumbled into trousers and a fresh shirt before sinking back onto the bed. He’s ready to go.

He just. Needs a minute.

Zayn shifts, soft rustle of his leather jacket, and suddenly there’s pressure on Liam’s foot. He moves his palms from where they’re pressing into his eyes just enough to watch, perplexed, as Zayn pulls a pair of clean gray socks over Liam’s feet, eyes careful on the movement like it takes work. When he finishes, he leans back to hook the uppers of Liam’s boots around his fingers from where they rest behind him. One he leaves off to the side, gingerly easing Liam’s foot into the other. He silently repeats it with the other foot, circumspect as he ties the laces on each.

Then he looks up to where Liam watches, silent and open.

It’s the oddest possible thing to have happened, the most random thing for Zayn to have done. Completely perplexing.

Weirdly tender.

“I’m going to be late if you don’t hurry,” Zayn says quietly, still gazing up at Liam from under soft lashes.  It sounds like a deflection, like an excuse, but it doesn’t make Zayn’s gaze any less _open,_ attentive in a way that breathes concern.

Liam hunches down, cups Zayn’s head under his jaw. Kisses him, soft and slow and close-mouthed. Just to feel the press of skin. Just to breathe in the proximity.

Zayn doesn’t say anything when Liam pulls back, only looks thoughtful with his gaze slightly averted.

“Let’s get going, then,” Liam says, standing despite the riotous protest inside his skull.

Still on his knees, Zayn darts a glance up to him. His hands are limp in his lap and his eyes are massive and pale in the diffuse morning light and he’s an angel, probably, with that crown of messy hair growing out on the sides and a sweet, full mouth just slightly open with the angle he holds his china-fine chin at.

Liam’s breath stutters out. It’s not that he isn’t keenly, painfully aware of how Zayn looks—it’s ridiculous, practically, an unrealistic surplus—but he forgets, sometimes, its visceral power. Its ability to sear.

He’s winded with it for a fraction of a moment, Zayn’s long body unfolding to stand in front of him.

Fully unthinking, Liam raises his hand to Zayn’s waist, molds it to the leather of his jacket. He knows anything he says could send Zayn skittering away, always so capricious with moments of affection, so he says nothing. Just stares. Drinks it in like honey.

Zayn lets him for all of ten seconds—more than long enough, really—and then kicks his boot gently against Liam’s.

The moment breaks, a snapping thread.

“I’ll be back around two,” Zayn tells him as he slides out of the car thirty minutes later. “Gonna stop by my flat to grab clothes and stuff.”

Liam nods, wincing a bit with the twinge in his head. “Be safe, please.”

Zayn shrugs, screwing his face up in thought. “Might be. Might also go blow someone in the toilets for fifty quid and use the money to start that coke habit I’ve been meaning to get around to.” He makes like he’s about to turn and head to class but stops, quirking his head back. “No wait. Smack. A smack habit.”

“Do that,” Liam encourages flatly. “See you at two, yeah?”

Faking distress, Zayn bites his lip. “You gonna want a gram, as well?”

“Go learn a thing,” Liam says on a rumbled laugh.

Zayn laughs too. “He thinks I come here to _learn,_ ” he says, shaking his head as he turns away.

Liam watches him go and his heart throbs, sensation not dulled in the slightest by a layer of fatigue and his building headache.

He sighs, a perfunctory self-reprimand before pulling back onto the road. The morning is already promising to be too long. Sitting here strung out on the sight of Zayn weaving through a crowd isn’t going to make it happen faster.

He might do it anyway. Just sit and watch, track Zayn down the little path and into the neurosciences building. Watch the way he neatly avoids bumping into people that pass, how his fingers curl on his rucksack’s strap—worn, like he’s done it a thousand times before. Watch the way he breathes when he doesn’t feel observed, when he’s not _trying_ so fucking hard to make Liam scream or give in or get hard.

He just wants to watch him, like this.

Ah, but that’s a bit creepy, Liam knows. Definitely not an urge he could drag into the light of day and have others call on the level.

And he really does have somewhere to be. Liam shifts the car back out into traffic, pulling up an address on his phone at the lull of a stoplight.

It’s rather far, which is unfortunate. Every second he doesn’t have the man’s statement recorded and held as evidence, the arsonists have another opportunity to tip the guy off, warn him of what’s coming.

If they haven’t already. There’s no sign of life through the windows of the flat when Liam climbs up the steps of the dirty stoop. The door is gray and battered, neglected like the rest of the building, but it’s by no means a slum. Decent, given the location.  He knocks harder and a bit faster than is entirely polite.

“Metropolitan Police, open up,” he calls, firm about it. Sometimes he thinks the words might be tattooed on him somewhere, the same ten syllables said the same damn way every time for years.

There’s no response.

Not unprecedented. He tries again, bangs of his fist harder, voice more urgent. “Police, open _up._ ”

Nothing. He could just be out running errands. Buying groceries. Purchasing the services of another arson gang for another murder boat. Anything, really.

Liam sighs and resigns himself to skulking around the uninspiring flat block, interviewing neighbors and waiting until either the bloke comes home or Winston signs off on Liam breaking in.

Breakfast is probably called for. Liam spins slowly on the concrete landing, pulling his phone out to look up the McDonald’s breakfast hours. He can never remember.

A breeze blows, then. The wind shifts.

The smell hits him.

 

Zayn beats him back to the flat. He’s sitting leaned against the door of it in the narrow little interior corridor, dank light doing nothing to smother the curious glint of his eyes when he sees the detective approach.

“Don’t,” Liam says, remembering last time he came back from examining a body.

It comes out sharper than he means it to, but Zayn just blinks it away, grappling on the door handle to haul himself to his feet. Liam casts an automatic hand to his shoulder when it looks like he might stumble.

He leaves it there, thumb pressed to the hollow of Zayn’s collarbone, obvious even under leather and cotton and skin.

Skin. Liam blinks quickly, trying to dispel the image of mottling flesh, blood and rot.

And gravity. The lead from the arson gang had brought Liam to the flat of a man now identified as Samuel Hueffed, twenty-five and found dangling in his kitchen.

The thing about suicide by hanging is that it makes for an absolutely ghastly after-image. If your body is recovered within a day, it’s only haunting and creepy in the initial shock of it, skin made pale and eyes bulging open.

If you’re not recovered for a few days, it becomes another matter entirely.

“We’ll get to it,” Zayn says, certain. He doesn’t push, though, just follows Liam into the flat and sits next to him when the detective slumps heavily down into the sofa cushions.

Liam breathes for a moment, swallowing against the stale taste of vomit that persists even past the scrub he gave his mouth in the station loo. He tangles his fingers with Zayn’s absently, letting the warmth anchor him away from fresh memories of decay.

Always fresh, aren’t they? The same clumsy incision. Scar tissue overlapping.

After a moment—after Loki, panting blithely, has fit himself into the space between Zayn’s feet on the floor—Liam extricates his blank stare from where it had come to rest on the heater under the window. He turns his head to examine Zayn. Those same bright eyes from the hall, burning with questions. Mouth twitching like he’s fighting a losing battle with his patience.

Liam looks down, sees Loki staring up at him with an eerily similar expression. Any other day, it would be fucking adorable, the pair of them with their heads quirked in interest.

The heater clicks over, devastatingly ordinary.

He swallows again, still tasting bile. Still smelling rotting flesh. God, _why_ is that smell so insistent always? Liam feels like it lives _in_ him, sometimes.

“He offed himself,” he manages finally, voice like gravel.

Zayn’s eyebrow raises once, so precise it has to be a voluntary gesture, but he doesn’t say anything. His lips are very slightly puckered like he’s thinking, full and some faint, dusky shade of red that Liam’s never seen anywhere else.

He pulls Zayn’s hand more fully into his lap, bringing his other hand over it. He traces the perfect, blunt edges of Zayn’s nails as he speaks. “They had the wrong name for him. Franklin, they said, but it was—Hueffed. Sam Hueffed. He.” A breath out to aid in forcing back the memories. The swell of the man’s extremities, flooded with all the fluids of decay. “He hanged himself in his kitchen. It was—it had to have been… _days_ ago.”  He can’t help the way his stomach spasms, then. God, the fucking _smell._ “Landlord got a complaint yesterday from another tenant. They thought—they thought it might be a raccoon or something.” Quieter—and now Liam is realizing his voice had dropped to a low mutter already, vocal cords protesting the gruesome retelling, “They’ve had problems with that before, apparently. Raccoons.”

There’s a fray on the thigh of Liam’s trousers that he’s just now noticed, a tiny blue-gray thread sticking out from the grain. His fingers twitch like they might move to smooth it, maybe pull at it.

It’s in this instant that he feels Zayn’s lips on his skin, just south of his cheekbone. The kiss is short and dry, a little coarse from stubble.

Liam could crumble. His brow pinches as his eyes slip closed. “What was that for,” he whispers. His voice is probably shot, throat sore, tongue thick and verging on noncompliant.

“Looked like you needed it,” Zayn murmurs softly, still so close to Liam. He presses another soft kiss to the corner of his jaw. “You like when I do that sort of thing.”

Something approaching a smile, heavy lips quirking just slightly. “I do.”

Zayn hums an agreement into the skin behind Liam’s ear before kissing there, too. “’M gonna ask questions,” he informs Liam, nuzzling properly near the back of his neck now, “and I’m going to do it in forty-five minutes.”

He states it like fact. The sun is a star, cigarettes are poison, forty-five minutes.

There are days when that tone has the ability to unfurl desire in Liam’s abdomen, makes him stupid and clumsy with want. Today it grounds him, gives him a goal to work toward.

Be under control in the next forty-five minutes. Lock away every nasty piece of sensory information from the day—the burst blood vessels in both of Hueffed’s eyes, the spongy smack of his limbs hitting the floor when they cut him down and then managed to lose hold of him, the pungent warmth in the flat from the heating system he hadn’t turned off before hanging himself, the taste of bile, the _smell_ —and answer questions about the actual case. Talk through it, maybe, process and think the way Liam does best: out loud.

Forty-five minutes to get to a place where he can do that.

So Liam pulls himself from the couch and heads to the bathroom, strips down and lets the spray of water scald him for a while. Gets dressed in clean trousers and a different shirt—something that smells of detergent and not decomposing organs. Makes a small snack to try and battle the insistent press of nausea to his gut, some tea to soothe his nerves. He breathes. He breathes. He breathes.

Liam hands off a cup to Zayn and sits back where he started, thighs spread so one touches the arm of the sofa and the other presses into the warm of the boy next to him.

Zayn checks his phone for the time. “Eleven minutes,” he informs him quietly.

Liam nods agreeably, rotating his body a bit to face him. He lays an arm on the back of the sofa and drags Zayn into him, pleased when the boy lets himself be kissed. It’s small little presses of lips, undemanding until Zayn tilts his head and opens up for it with a small sound that Liam isn’t sure he knows he’s made.

It’s easy to get lost in. Liam could probably count on one hand the number of times he and Zayn have done this, just kissed to kiss, no intent of taking it somewhere dirtier or more intense.

Not that kissing Zayn has is ever anything short of intense. Liam gets dizzy with it, sometimes, then wonders what that says. Zayn explained once how saliva contains molecules from all over the body, organs and glands Liam claims sound fictional. How kissing is only addictive if it’s someone your mind has silently chosen, started bonding you to before you can do a thing about it.

Zayn draws back before Liam really wants him to. His bottom lip is swollen from where Liam was sucking on it, still a little wet, and Liam can’t resist angling forward and pushing his hand up through the back of Zayn’s hair to hold him still while he lays one last series of small kisses to it.

When he finally pulls back, Zayn simply says, “Tell me.”

And it’s better, now. A manageable lesion. “I went to interview—I figured more like _interrogate,_ but—the lead from the blokes in the arson gang.” It pings something in his recent memory, foggy but persistent. What—

Oh. He makes a mental note, reminds himself to ask how Zayn knew those boys.

Maybe when he doesn’t have the image of a corpse freshly seared into his eyes, he argues with himself. Maybe then.

Funny, that, how priority shifts so drastically when someone dies. No scandal grabs like death, that’s for fucking sure.

The detective realizes he’s been quiet for a long moment. Shakes himself out of it. “He didn’t answer, which—that could be for any reason, really. Sending a package, walking the dog.” Loki perks up a bit like he understood that, but Liam ignores him so that he doesn’t get his little doggy hopes up. The pup quickly brings his head back down between his paws. “I’d planned to do some background work while I waited him out, y’know, assuming he hadn’t been given a warning by any of those—” Liam huffs out a grim chuckle, “— _charming_ lads we met last night.”

Zayn tilts his head back and closes his eyes like he’s picturing it, Liam askance on the doorstep of some bloke with the power to make their case.

Or fail to.

“Only, there was. Like I said, the smell. And.” Liam swallows. “It didn’t add up, suddenly—or, it did, but not to anything good—so I.” He swallows, cheeks pinking.

“Y’what,” Zayn asks lazily, eyes still closed, line of his throat still long and lovely from the way his skull rests.

“I…” Scratching his nose, Liam forces himself to say it. “…broke down the door. A little bit.”

Zayn’s eyes flicker open like a lighter catching. “ _Delightful._ ”

Liam winces. “No?” he tries. It’s not delightful, he’s fairly sure. “It’s—proper brutish, first of all. Not to mention frowned upon. Procedurally.”

“Bet you looked good,” Zayn remarks, drawing out the last word. Then, “Can I suck you off later?”

Liam laughs because he has to. “I’ll never understand how your mind works.”

Zayn snorts. “I know.”

“May I continue?”

The boy grunts an affirmative, eyes falling closed again.

“It was obvious something had died in there,” Liam continues, “and it wasn’t a terribly big flat. Maybe a little smaller than yours.” He inhales through his mouth, reminds himself that the air here is clear. A little cold from the open window. Free of rot. “I let the smell of it lead me, but that’s not…not what did it.” He licks at the back of his teeth, lost in the recollection.

He doesn’t realize how long he’s been quiet until Zayn speak. “What did it,” he prompts, toneless.

“He was hanging there, in the middle of the kitchen.” Along with the heater, the kitchen light had been left on. Its yellow light backlit the corpse like a macabre silhouette out of a horror film, showing eerie purple in contrast to the bulb’s dingy glow.

It’s not a sight Liam ever wants to be familiar with—is already too familiar with, it seems. His movements are too heavy to be fidgeting, really, but they’re constant in the same way. Will be, until he gets the sensation of something crawling under his skin to dispel. “Used an industrial-grade extension cord. It—it was cutting into his skin, by the time I got there. Oozing a bit.”

“A couple days, then?” Zayn asks, interest curving his syllables. “He’d been dead for a couple of days.”

Liam twitches a shrug. “Must’ve been, yeah. That was the read from the medical examiner. But,” he mimics Zayn’s pose, head back and eyes falling loosely closed, “it’s not my department, strictly speaking.”

“But it messed you up,” comes Zayn’s voice. “You looked like you’d been crying or something when you got home.”

“I threw up,” Liam clarifies, still not opening his eyes. “I had a headache and then—have you ever smelled a rotting body? I didn’t _cry._ ”

“I’m just saying there’s precedent,” Zayn murmurs. He shifts, warmth pressing more firmly into Liam’s side. “If you recall.”

The detective recalls. Stinging saline and coursing fear and a body paired with an explicit message: the killer knows enough about Zayn to end his life.

Will likely attempt to.

“What a fun day that was,” he deadpans. “Anyway, I called in forensics, debriefed at the station, came home.”

“Mm.” Liam can feel Zayn’s hair tickle his jaw when the boy slouches into him, head lolling on his shoulder. “Not sure how you made a decomposing suicide case sound about as dry as a read on stocks, but you managed it.”

Liam reaches up without looking and flicks under Zayn’s jaw. Feels the muscles in Zayn’s cheek shift when he smiles. “Didn’t ask me to make it interesting.”

“So that’s that lead gone, then.”

A sigh. “Suppose. But he’d—he was dead before we even _talked_ to the gang. There had to have been something that changed for him, to make him…not want to be alive anymore.”

A considering noise, softer than a hum. “Maybe he saw the situation ending poorly. Maybe he  took the logical next step. Nothing intricate.”

Liam feels himself frown a little with the implication. “Suicide is never logical.”

“It is if you’re backed into a corner,” Zayn argues dispassionately.

There’s a whole can of existential weirdness in Zayn’s psyche they could explore, probably, but the detective is fully unable to conjure up the energy for it. He shifts a bit, splaying out so his leg sprawls over Zayn’s lap. “This case is a fucking nightmare even before you start, like. Looking at the bodies.”

“Or the notes,” Zayn adds quietly, thoughtfully.

He doesn’t seem scared.

But then, he never really does.

 

“So you’ve got…”

“Lecture, lab, lab,  _independent_ lab.”

“Fuck,” Liam mutters, “it’s Wednesday, then, isn’t it.”

“Only according to the Gregorian calendar,” Zayn mollifies, sipping at his tea. His eyes never leave the notebook filled with inscrutable notes in messy scrawl.

Liam had tried to read a page the other day and narrowly escaped a brain hemorrhage.

“Loki missed you on his walk last night,” he says idly, tracing Zayn’s sleep-rumpled features with his gaze. “Would hardly let me put the lead on.”

“Loki’s a reasonable boy,” returns Zayn. His voice is still morning soft, none of its customary bite or occasional, devastating lack of inflection.  ”He knows I’m good for it later.”

He’s still not looking up; Liam would very much like to see his eyes before he leaves for the day.

“Well,” he says, pushing himself to his feet, “I’ve a serial murder investigation to make zero headway in, so I best be off.”

Zayn mutters, “Quitter’s attitude,” and makes no move to further acknowledge Liam as he strides toward the door.

“ _Hey,_ ” he calls, sharp, when Liam’s hand is hovering over the doorknob.

Liam turns slowly, feigning puzzlement.

Zayn sits with his brows pressed into a petulant line, irritated like Liam’s done him a great personal wrong. “What the fuck kind of goodbye was  _that,_ ” he gripes.

With a grin that falls between  _sated_ and  _wolfish,_ Liam strides slowly back to the table. He spreads one hand out on the surface for leverage before leaning across, other hand coming to grip at the back of Zayn’s neck as he pulls the huffy boy into a lingering kiss.

It’s warm and tastes a little like toothpaste, a little like tea. Liam licks once over the seam of Zayn’s lips with the tip of his tongue, aching to feel the plush give more fully for a moment before reluctantly pulling away.

It takes Zayn’s eyes an entire two seconds to blink open and refocus, pouty expression melted into something approaching satisfied.

“See you tonight, yeah?” Liam asks softly, hovering over the boy still.

“Only if you’re not making me take the tube,” Zayn says.

Rolling his eyes, Liam hitches his bag higher on his shoulder and finally pulls back. “Have yet to see you be made to do a damn thing you didn’t want to.”

“Put up with your snoring all of last night,” the boy says with the mildest fire.

“You’re absolutely full of shit. I don’t snore.” Liam opens the door, looking over his shoulder once. “Study hard.”

“Go solve a fucking crime,” Zayn snipes, shooing Liam with a dismissive wave of his hand. A couple of his fingers catch the weak morning light with the chunky metal adorning them. Liam remembers the feel of the more geometric one beneath his teeth the night before.

“Bye,” he says softly, feeling somewhere between liquid and air.

He maybe imagines the  _Bye, Li,_ he hears as the door closes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so, I don't usually do end notes but I wanted to make sure it was clear: **the attitudes of the characters in this story do not necessarily reflect the opinions held by the author, nor the opinions of the real people these fictional characters are loosely based on.** I say this in regard to Zayn and Liam's conversation about suicide in particular, but it's a good note for the story as a whole. K, just wanted to be clear.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I didn’t ask because I had no way to_ know,” _he shouts. “Do you know what happens to people who consciously withhold information from ongoing investigations?”_  
> 
> 
> _“Oh, this is all a bit familiar, isn’t it,” Zayn drawls. “Last time you threatened me with the law, do you remember how that worked out for you?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyo. This chapter's a bit longer than usual! Hopefully that's a good thing.  
> 
> 
> Lots of love to Monica, who has told me to murder her ass roughly twice as many times as she's told me to die today. Sigh, friendship is magical. Lots of love to everyone who's taken the time to read, to comment, and to chat with me about the story. You're all the very best.  
> 
> 
> Find me on tumblr at protagonist-m, or else leave an offering of Toblerone and white wine on your windowsill and I shall come to you.

Something isn’t adding up.

“Why?” Liam rasps into his mobile, resting with one elbow propped up on the sleep-warm bed. “I mean, I appreciate the offer, but—”

“You’re good at your job, Payne,” Winston cuts in through the line. “We’d like to keep it that way.” The man grunts out a sound like a cough before continuing. “Can’t do that if you’re having a mental collapse.”

Liam shifts a little. He keeps his voice low in the early gray of the day. “Right,” he says slowly, “but I’m not. Having a mental collapse.” Though this conversation does, as it happens, make him a bit less sure.

“Call it heading it off, then,” says Winston. “Whenever someone voices a concern, it’s policy to review the situation. You know.”

With a frown, Liam takes that in. So there was a _concern,_ whatever the fuck that means, and now Liam apparently has the day off, courtesy of Ben Winston.

Something really isn’t adding up.

The man must mistake the flummoxed silence as a brewing disagreement, because he’s talking again a moment later. “Don’t be noble, Payne. You’re under a pretty fair amount of strain. It’s brave to be accepting, I find.”

It clicks. The frown deepens. “Someone voiced a concern,” he verifies.

A short pause where Winston seems to realize this is news, and not particularly welcome. “Well, it was implicit, but,” he tries after a short pause, “it was fairly obvious what he was getting at.”

Liam licks over his teeth. “Right. Thanks for the heads up. And the…concern.”

He can almost hear Winston’s uncomfortable shrug. “Get some rest,” he says, and hangs up.

With a low sigh verging on irritated, Liam peers back over his shoulder. Zayn is still curled into himself as he sleeps, hair fluffy and lips parted in a sweet little pout. Liam thinks about kissing it for all of a millisecond before he remembers the last time he woke the boy up before he was ready. He has every reason to believe it was the motivation behind an extremely grisly painting Zayn had ended up producing later that day, showcasing it like a cat who’d successfully hunted a favored songbird. Smile wide, eyes glimmering.

Liam hadn’t repeated the offensive gesture again. Doesn’t plan to now, even if it’s tempting—always tempting, to get Zayn’s mouth under his.

Part of it, he reckons, is that it’s an intensely mutable act. For all that Zayn’s a lightning storm in a delicate glass bottle, he’s also fiercely adaptive. When Liam has shit days, they’re pretty phenomenally shit—death threats, near stabbings, _actual murders_ , Christ.  All that misery gained through the worst truths of the human condition has to go _somewhere._

Then he licks into Zayn’s mouth, presses into him, and it evaporates like monoxide fumes into nothingness.

Or else he has good days, days of righteous triumph, and it’s white-hot conquest rolling off his tongue. Or it’s fear, or desperation, or anger, or rare, brilliant joy.

Zayn takes it all. Transmutes it into something secret between them, a language of dependence spoken by two.

Which isn’t nothing, Liam reckons.

Only now he’s thinking in terms like _dependence_ and _addiction_ and he’s just remembered why he wants to kiss his irritation into Zayn’s lips, drag it down his spine with his teeth until it’s less bitter. He hits the speed dial and swings his legs out of bed, padding into the hall.

Either Louis expected his call or wholly did _not_ expect his call, because he answers on the second ring.

“Payno,” he greets, revealing nothing.

“What did you tell Winston to have him keeping me out of the station?” Liam demands. He’s got a hand on the wall of the hallway, fingers drumming out his irritation.

He can almost hear the way Louis flattens his mouth. “Good to see Ben is doing his job,” he says, bitter.

“Louis,” Liam presses. “What. Did. You say.”

“I told him you were having trouble prioritizing, alright?” Louis speaks fast even by his standards, defensive and sounding nearly as infuriated as Liam knows himself to be. “Didn’t realize it was gonna become a thing.”

“Trouble—what does that even _mean?_ ” Liam demands. He moves further from the bedroom door to avoid waking the boy in his bed. “Trouble prioritizing the _case?_ You know this has been my number one since the first body.”

Louis forces out a cold little laugh. “Well. It was.”

There’s something seething under Liam’s skin, making his brain overheat into what threatens to become whiteout rage. “Keep his name out of your mouth.”

“Would if I could, Li,” Louis replies, brittle, “but in case you’ve forgotten—or hey, maybe never noticed—Zayn’s sort of _part of the case now._ ”

As if Liam could forget. “Wait, now I’m confused,” he mocks jaggedly, “I’m apparently ‘prioritizing’ him enough to be removed from the office for a day, but you _got_ me removed _because_ of him?”

“I didn’t get you removed, you complete dick,” Louis hisses. “That was Winston’s call. And yeah, I’m fucking saying that’s a problem.”

“ _How_ ,” Liam barks.

_“How?”_ Louis responds. “You’re slipping, mate. You’re so preoccupied with the sex and the—whatever the fuck else, the _charm_ or whatever—that you haven't noticed how off-course you are. There’s shit right in front of you that you’re not even seeing. _Liam._ ”

And it grates horribly into place. “Oh,” Liam breathes, so quietly it’s more a parting of his lips than anything fully vocalized.

Louis keeps talking. “Look, I just—”

“Save it,” Liam hears himself say. When did the ringing in his ears get so loud?

“Li,” Louis tries again, “please, just—I don’t want—”

Tomlinson can go to hell with what he wants, Liam decides. He thinks he hears Horan’s admonishing tenor as he hits the end button.

His neck is burning so fiercely he thinks it'll peel like a sunburn, rage toxic in his veins. His fingers flex once around his phone like he might throw it.

He wants to. He doesn’t.

When Zayn wakes up a half hour later, Liam is in some kind of overdrive. Loki is curled up on the couch where he landed after Liam took him on a lengthy walk, working his little legs to the max as he kept pace with his silently fuming owner. 

Now Liam is silently fuming in the small kitchen, keeping track of the eggs and beans and frying potatoes while slicing a melon.

“This is fucking weird,” Zayn greets. Liam pivots with a frying pan still clutched in his hand.

“You’ve got pillow creases,” Liam returns, sliding back around to face the hot stove, determined not to lose his rhythm, “like an idiot.”

“An idiot you’re cooking breakfast for,” Zayn notes. “Which, again, is fucking weird.”

“Cut the shit, admit you’re happy about it,” Liam says, absent. He gives the eggs another stir. They should be ready to take off in a minute or so.

“I’m not happy about it,” Zayn denies. He sits at the table anyway, such an expectant gesture. It’s the chair he favors, Liam realizes with a pang. The one on the right.

“D’you want juice or just tea?” he asks.

Halfway through Zayn’s chatter over breakfast about some discovery made regarding Parkinson’s disease, Liam thinks he might tell him.

It’s clear, now, in a way it hadn’t been. Deeper than any accusation of losing touch with the investigation, closer to the bone than simple frustration with a case that’s dead in the water—Louis _suspects_ Zayn. Dark energy and complexities bathed in mercury, changeable and seemingly toxic; it’s not that Liam can’t understand where the pathologist is coming from.

He just can’t fucking breathe through the notion.

The thought is making its seventeenth consecutive loop through Liam’s brain when Zayn pauses in his mellifluous rambling and leans across the table, pressing a light kiss to his mouth.

“Pay attention,” the boy chastises, but it’s soft like an endearment.

There’s a moment of crisis in the early afternoon where Liam feels the claustrophobic urge to review case material. Run on that same macabre hamster wheel. It’s a day off, however vexingly it came about, but does such a thing exist, really? So Liam meanders back to the files, muttering _stuff it_ with no heat when he sees Zayn’s pointedly raised eyebrow.

Disheartening though it was, Hueffed’s suicide offered its own clues about the arson and, ultimately, the killer: willing to work with others. Willing to exploit existing criminal elements, though unwilling to risk direct exposure.

There’s also something niggling at the back of Liam’s mind, a crackling sort of knowledge from nowhere. Instinct, they call it.

Hueffed offed himself because of the killer.

Liam can’t guess at the specifics. Until a report of his belongings and social media is finished, there’s no way to know whether Hueffed was aware that he was, in fact, abetting a murderer. It may have been approached like any other business deal, Hueffed as a resource manager on the bad edge of society’s fringes, directing people in need of various services.

It might be even more complex. Knowing what they do about the arson gang and that particular wharf, Hueffed could be a mob affiliate. If that’s the case, what does it mean for their serial murderer? Liam’s worked cases with involvement from organized crime syndicates before. It’s _possible_ that’s where this leads. But he’s never seen a mob case that looked like this. A row of grotesquely presented bodies, seemingly without an agenda or point to be made.

Only the explicit intention to get to Detective Inspector Liam Payne, infecting his every action with the heavy implication: people are dead because of him.

So probably this doesn’t lead to organized crime. But Hueffed didn’t die for nothing, and as unsettling as Liam finds Zayn’s pronouncement on the logic of the man’s final action, he can concede the point.

Sam Hueffed was looking to escape something.

And so Liam is left with the same basic sensation of knowing that Hueffed’s death and their murderer—taunting and just out of reach—are connected.

Damned if he can prove it with the current evidence, though. The detective flips back and forth listlessly through the same dozen documents—shouldn’t this all be digitized by now? Who’s in charge of that, he wonders—and finally has to give up when Tomlinson’s name appears at the top of a report and sends acid racing through his veins.

Liam glances over at where Zayn is drawing, squashed into the corner of the sofa the way he always seems to be. His eyes are blank like his mind is somewhere very, very far from here.

“What’re you doing,” Zayn says without looking up.

A shrug. “Giving up on casework, mostly.” Liam tosses the stack of papers onto the coffee table, wincing slightly when they come apart and start dropping to the floor.

Zayn smiles a little, gaze still downcast as he moves his pen in short, audible strokes.

He looks so settled. In contrast, Liam feels like peeling off his skin, itching from the way noxious thoughts of Tomlinson and his fucking _accusations_ keep leaking through his pores.

“Let’s go—out, yeah?” Liam says, dragging knuckles over his eyes. “Stuffy in here.”

“Don’t make me go to a park,” Zayn says. He draws something in an arch on his page. “I refuse to interact with nature.”

“Parks aren’t—you pick, then,” Liam replies. He stands to fetch his trainers.

It’s a museum exhibit, which the detective supposes he should have seen coming. Somewhere under visions of bloated, decaying flesh and the maroon tint of betrayal, Liam vaguely remembers Zayn mentioning it a few weeks back. It’s November and the weather is finally getting cold in earnest; Liam watches his breath plume in front of him as they climb the steps of the museum, short little exhales swirled into nothing as they jostle in through the imposing double doors.

There’s something of a queue to the exhibit hall Zayn drags Liam to, hand insistent on the sleeve of his jacket, but Liam’s amused enough by the anticipation on his face to not mind.

“It’s all done with polymer,” Zayn explains. The queue starts to move as a group of public schoolers are lead out by a squat little woman in a stiff-looking blouse. “They preserve it all in this process called _plastination,_ by replacing internal fluids with acetone and then replacing _that_ with—”

“You’re going to have to explain this again,” Liam informs him, snaking a hand around the boy’s waist, “when we’re actually inside the exhibit.”

Zayn shakes his head. “What, plastination? That’s not even the interesting part.”

When they’re finally let into the crowded exhibit hall, it becomes clear that, no, that isn’t the interesting part.

The hall is filled with bodies in different states of anatomical undress, skeletons welcoming them in and muscular frames posed to walk or run.

“Holy shit,” Liam breathes, wide eyes taking in each shiny plasticized figure in turn. Adults. Children. Mutations in display cases—organs where they shouldn’t be, soft, blemish-free skin where eyes usually are, external _teeth—_ and body systems with thick display plaques at eye-level for the primary-schoolers winding through the floor in groups dozens.

It’s a lot to take in. There appears to be an exhibit on fetal development on the far wall, a family of four surveying it while one of the mothers explains each display to the little girl whose hand she holds. The musculature display shows the ridges and bunching of each muscle in all their grotesque detail, fibrous and pink. There’s a smaller but no less potent display with what appears to be someone’s spine, tendrils that bring to mind jellyfish pinned to it from the base all the way up to where the brain sits, neat as you please, at the top of the stem.

Drowning in viscera, Liam manages, “They’re always smaller than you think they’re going to be. Brains.”

Zayn snorts a laugh. “You look at a lot of brains in your line of work?”

“Sometimes when you fall asleep I peek at yours through your ear.” Liam allows himself to be tugged once again toward some display that’s caught Zayn’s eye. “Which reminds me, you should probably get that checked out.”

It’s a dumb joke, simple and silly, and Zayn’s only response is his teeth pressing momentarily into Liam’s shoulder as they slow in front of a large case housing—

“Zayn,” Liam says urgently.

“Not used to seeing them fresh, huh?” says Zayn, lilting voice a touch proud. “Or, well. Preserved, is more—”

He stops when he takes in the rigid set of Liam’s shoulders, the stiffness of his face, as if he too has been sealed in polymer.

The detective is distantly aware of Zayn’s speech dying, the low murmur of the crowd that churns around them. The pinch of his trainers where he hasn’t quite broken this pair in yet, the way his jacket is bordering on too warm in the cramped museum hall.

Mostly, he’s aware of his heartbeat. Fast and ragged, a desperate tattoo against his breastbone, calling out to the rows and rows and _rows_ of human hearts displayed before him as if suspended by nothing on a vertical, clear acrylic display.

They’re mostly fist-sized, as hearts tend to be. Some a bit smaller. Some massively larger, displayed in a corner of the wall labeled _Anomalies,_ along with those housing extra valves, or queasy discoloration, or misshapen growths.

Still locked in some frantic paralysis, Liam counts the number of rows and columns the hearts are arranged in. It computes to thirty-five, and that’s.

That’s a bit terrifying, isn’t it. The display is barely scientific, ranges far closer to some macabre form of art, with its clear display and its suspended vital organs and Liam isn’t actually drawing complete breaths right now, he realizes, working to push his lungs.

His heart is still beating like it’s trying to escape.

“Oh, fuck me,” he hears Zayn mutter faintly. “Liam, hey.” He turns away from the case, curving a hand so his fingers can massage the back of the detective’s neck. “Li. C’mon, love, bring it back. Deep breaths. Yeah.”

Liam breathes, and he doesn’t feel panicked, exactly, but the throb of dread is heavy in his limbs. He breathes, and it’s better, with Zayn rubbing small circles into his neck, but it’s not _good._ He breathes, and remembers that these hearts are not _his_ hearts, the ten viciously extracted organs that feel so closely tied to his own life—to a killer who won’t just let him _be_ —and that these, at least, were freely given by their owners.

Not ripped from their chests.

“It’s just cortisol,” Zayn is nearly cooing, hand not on Liam’s neck coming to grip his shaking wrist, “just noradrenaline. Your adrenal medulla is secreting hormones that are overriding your sense of logic, yeah? Just a reactive symptom. Just fight or flight, babe, come back to me.”

Clawing at the insides of his mind—the insides of his _chest,_ fuck _—_ is a sensation that has Liam suppressing a scream, locking his knees against the way they threaten to give out. His mind is swimming, swimming, swimming with acrid fear, and Zayn’s there, and Zayn’s touching him, but Zayn can’t touch _this._

Liam swipes at his face, catching the few awful, burning drops of moisture that skitter down his cheeks. “I’m.”

The world blurs, curious faces and more plasticized nightmares, until suddenly it’s all white tile and cold, bright light.

Zayn’s dragged him to the toilets, then.

Which is fortunate, because Liam finds himself hunched over in one of the stalls, quaking while his shoulders heave.

“Has this ever…” A shuffle of Zayn’s feet outside the door that Liam’s left open, as if he’s unsure where to stand. “Do you have anxiety attacks frequently, or. Do you save it for special occasions.”

Another twist of Liam’s guts. “No,” he chokes out, spitting bile. “Jesus, I’m sorry, this has never—”

“I didn’t think the hearts would have that effect on you,” Zayn says quietly.

Liam shakes his head pointlessly. It’s still a bit hard to think, but, “Did you think I’d _like_ them?”

A pause. “I didn’t really think about you at all.”

When Liam swears into the toilet, it reverberates back. Maybe a little colder. “D’you ever think about other people, then?” It’s a bit harsher than it needs to be, accusatory in a way Liam didn’t intend. It’s still an honest question.

Not that Liam is opposed, per se, to spending his day off at a museum. It’s just that he’d rather not spend it surrounded by the very thing driving him mad each night. Row after row of hearts, each as telltale as the ones that haunt his dreams.

“Not especially,” Zayn answers, and it sounds so easy for him. Liam shudders again, unsure if it’s a stress reaction or something darker.

They’re largely quiet as Liam gets himself cleaned up, rinses his mouth perfunctorily with foul tasting water from the tap. He swipes at his pink-rimmed eyes and fixes a few flyaway’s, annoyed but unsurprised to find that Zayn looks like a model in a grunge shoot under the harsh lighting. 

There’s a narrow hall leading from the toilets back to the main corridor of the museum. Liam takes advantage of it to avoid seeing the hearts or any of the rest of the exhibit.

A little pang goes through him when he sees Zayn casting a glance back toward the hall. Which is ridiculous; the boy just told him he doesn’t really care if the detective finds plasticized carnage intensely disturbing.

Liam still apologizes. “I’m sorry for. That.” He coughs a brittle, self-deprecating laugh. “Whatever that was.”

Zayn shrugs, frame jostling a bit as they descend the steps they’d so recently climbed. Liam feels like the worst human refuse, feels guilty and sore. “It’s your limbic system’s fault for being so fucked up.”

“Aren’t you the one who always tells me that we’re only brains in meat suits?” The detective fumbles a fag and lighter out of his jacket pocket.

“We are,” Zayn assures him. He brings his hand perilously close to the flame of Liam’s light, grabbing the man’s wrist and smacking his hand sharply until he finally drops the cigarette in defeat.

“Come on,” Liam snaps, “I’m stressed, I had a panic attack. You were there.”

“You’re _still_ having a—give me that,” Zayn snaps. He plucks the lighter out of Liam’s grip, stuffing it into his own pocket. “Your system is still flooded with cortisol, you don’t fucking need nicotine right now.”

Liam breathes out a hot, irritated breath, copper wires sparking down his spinal column. “Weren’t too concerned what I needed when you interfered on the stakeout, were you?”

Zayn pauses for the length of a stride. He picks it back up to fall in step with Liam, expression oddly blank. “You’ve weird priorities.”

It reminds the detective of his call to Louis this morning, the incendiary implications he hasn’t been able to push aside all day.

It has his tone twisting to something nasty. “You spewed some shit and almost got us knifed or _shot,_ ” Liam says. He’s surprised, a little, by the swell of anger. It fills the void, maybe, that the nameless fear of the heart display left behind.

“Darling,” Zayn drawls, long and condescending and why can’t he ever just say something nice, Liam wonders. “If you have an aversion to guns, I fear you might be in the wrong line of work.”

They’re to Liam’s car, now. Which is good, because it might look bad if Liam had Zayn pinned up against someone else’s vehicle by the hip. By the throat.

Liam traces his thumb over the steady thump of Zayn’s pulse on the side of his neck, a caress he mirrors at the jut of his hipbone. He squeezes, but not hard. Just enough to feel Zayn’s pulse tick up. Just enough to feel his breathing increase.

“How did they know you?” he asks lowly. He’d been thinking he could let it go—wanted to, just to spite Tomlinson and his insidious fucking accusations—but the thought won’t leave him alone.

Zayn stares into his eyes for a long moment, gaze shadowed by the dull light of the day. “Let’s go home first, Li,” Zayn says softly. He draws his bottom lip into his mouth and lets it pop back out, a bit swollen and shiny where he’d sucked on it.

It’s—Liam doesn’t know what it is. A tease, maybe. A distraction.

His body is responding like he wants more of it, though, whatever it is. Fear and anger and desire—they’re all so close to being the same, synapses a jumbled mess as Liam digs his thumb in a little harder at Zayn’s hip and kisses him.

Just for a minute. Just until he's less certain that he’s burning alive from how much he _feels._

He begs off to take Loki outside when they get back to his flat, hoping it’ll buy him some time to sort through it. At least, Liam hopes, he’ll be in some shape to interrogate the most vexing person on the planet.

It ends up not mattering how ready he is. Zayn gives him the length of time it takes to shut the door before he’s pressing him back against it, leg between Liam’s thighs.

“Can’t just,” Zayn breathes, sucking hot kisses to the slope of Liam’s neck, “touch me like that and then,” a pointed drag of teeth, “ _leave._ ”

Liam’s body is responding before he’s really thought about it, still on edge and still wanting so badly it’s its own physical ache. When it comes to Zayn, he wonders if he knows how to feel anything besides sensations so strong they hurt.

He pushes the jacket off Zayn’s shoulders while the boy works a spot on his clavicle over with his mouth. The fabric of his shirt is thin enough that Liam can tease his nipples through it, feel them stiffen as Zayn grinds slightly against his leg, but he’d much rather the shirt not be there at all.

So that has to go, only when he starts in on Zayn’s jeans next, Zayn is pawing at Liam’s clothes and it’s sort of a blur, then, losing his shirt somewhere in the hall, trousers shucked off at the doorway of his room.

It comes back into focus like a movie, Zayn kneeling over him at waist level on the dark sheets of the bed they didn’t bother making after getting up. 

“Let me suck you off,” Zayn is coaxing, mouth obscene and bright red from delirious kisses down the hallway, “please, Li, wanna taste you, yeah?”

Liam feels his cock throb at the intensity of Zayn’s tone, the desperation under the demand. He grabs himself by the base and props himself up so that the head of his dick barely brushes Zayn’s lips where he’s leaning down.

“Never gonna say no to that,” Liam informs him, free hand lacing in Zayn’s thick hair.

There’s a long, drawn-out moment where Zayn blinks, slow and heavy. He licks his lips, tongue bumping into Liam’s cock for a millisecond, making the muscle of his thigh twitch. Then he looks up through his thickets of eyelashes and smirks. His honey eyes crackle with their victory.  “I know.”

And Liam’s stomach drops.

“You fucking—” the detective starts. The rest never makes it past his lips; Zayn is meticulous about many things, cleaning his flat and research and breaking people down to their smallest parts, but he always sucks cock like he’s salivating for it. It’s tight, wet heat and obscene noises and a look on his face like he could shake open from how good it is, brow pinched and nose pressed to Liam’s groin even as the man can feel his throat tightening around him.

And usually that’s enough. Usually Zayn turns that ravenous drive inside him to the task of sucking Liam off as effectively as he turns it on everything else he deigns to engage with, filthy noises and the hot clench of his throat uninterrupted by things like speech.

There must always be exceptions.

“Was there something you wanted to _ask_ me, Liam?” Zayn rasps, smoky voice breaking over the words. He drags his puffy lips over Liam’s spit-slick length, eyes fluttering closed like it’s a religious experience.

Liam bites the bone of his wrist, trying to make his brain do anything at all. “Wanted—”

Zayn plunges back down, swallowing around Liam’s dick once he’s got it all buried down his throat.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Liam gasps. He feels sweat break out on his temples, his chest. “Zayn, I—”

“What, baby?” Zayn enquires, lips back to that maddening, not-enough drag up and down his dick. His gaze flickers over Liam’s body like hot flame. “Just ask me, I don’t mind.”

It’s mean, it’s so fucking mean, because Zayn _never_ calls Liam baby, and to do so now in such a mocking way is—

Going straight to Liam’s dick, mostly.

The detective growls low in his throat, hand that’s still gently resting in Zayn’s hair tightening. He means to pull him off, stop the soft mouthing just under the crown of his dick long enough that Liam can form a bloody question.

Zayn must sense as much, because he sucks the head of Liam’s cock back into his mouth and starts swirling his tongue, then goes back to fast bobs of his head when Liam groans and loosens his grip, off guard.

“Please,” Liam begs, and it’s for more and less of what Zayn’s giving him.

Zayn pops off again, a line of saliva momentarily connecting his lips to Liam’s cock and making the man squirm from how fucking good it looks. He studies Liam lazily, fully at home with someone begging for mercy beneath him.

Predatory. Unrepentant.

Zayn wanks Liam slowly, loosely. Just enough to keep him trembling and on edge, half-voiced whimpers falling from his lips. “Ask your question, Li,” he taunts, voice soft and languid and ruined.

Question. Liam had a question. “Why. Uh. Christ, Zayn, I can’t—”

“But it was bothering you so _much_ , wasn’t it?” Zayn cuts across. His eyes flash, embers in an updraft. “The idea that I’d been running with the wrong crowd. Making such bad friends.”

“Worry,” Liam tries as Zayn’s hand tightens, stroking him faster, “worry about you. Just—”

“Must be exhausting,” Zayn cuts in again, “always being irrationally terrified.” He licks over the head of Liam’s cock like an ice lolly, tracing the vein down his length before drawing back slightly and continuing to jerk him off. “Scared of your case. Scared of your killer. Scared I have a past.” He kisses Liam’s cockhead, eyes on the flush of it as he says, “I feel so sorry for you.”

“What the fuck,” Liam gasps, and comes. He watches, lightheaded, as he shoots across Zayn’s face, streaks of come landing on the cut of his cheekbones and across his nose. What lands on his mouth he licks up, pink tongue lapping at pearl white while Liam reels.

He’s still coming down and panting as he watches Zayn scoop off fingerfulls of come from his face and lick them delicately into his mouth. When he’s finished, he silently pads up the bed on the heels of his hands. Zayn leans down, pressing his lips into Liam’s insistently until the man’s mouth falls open.

It’s a bit shocking, the sensation of Liam’s own come being pushed into his mouth by Zayn’s clever tongue, but he’s too fucked out to protest or care all that much. He lets it happen, lets Zayn hover over him and feed him back to himself and _own_ him, really, mind and body and whatever else humans should truly hope they don’t possess.

Liam is hoping like hell.

When Zayn is satisfied with the job he’s done, he lays down next to Liam, cock still hard where it presses into his hip. He doesn’t seem terribly bothered by it. “Gonna give you a minute,” he says softly. “You look like you need it.”

Liam swallows against the bitterness lingering on his tongue. “Let me suck you off.” He’d even skip the mind games.

“No,” Zayn breathes, settling further into Liam’s side. The detective is wrapping an arm around him without thought, pressing them together on instinct. “We’re more creative than that, yeah?”

“Sure,” Liam rasps through barely-moving lips. He feels spent in the truest sense. Quiet and submissive.

Defeated, maybe.

Zayn’s message is clear, and Liam is many things, but he’s not an idiot.

He’s not going to get the answers he wants out of the boy dozing at his side.

Even though they’re easy, really—even simple lies would do. It’s not as though Zayn isn’t capable of evasion or occluding the truth through careful language, persuasive timbre. Instead of doing that, though, instead of any of his usual tricks, Zayn opted to suck Liam’s willpower out through his dick, taunting and oddly punishing the whole time.

It translates to _leave it alone_ better than a lot of things he could have done.

Zayn is hiding something, actively. Liam thinks about it as he traces vague shapes into the boy’s shoulder, muscles bunched where he’s fit himself under Liam’s arm.

He doesn’t come to any conclusions before Zayn wakes up and murmurs something absolutely filthy in his ear, hands wandering. He’s not any closer when Zayn begs off after, skin not even completely cooled down, claiming he wants to study alone for a bit.

He kisses Liam’s shoulder at the door before sliding past him into the hall, slinking away out of sight. Liam tries not to process it as a slight. Almost succeeds.

It takes all of a minute to realize Zayn’s left his rucksack on the floor of the living room, carelessly dropped after the museum fiasco. It takes shamefully less time for Liam to give in to the ever-insistent spark of curiosity blinking up through his consciousness, steering his hands to the hard shape of a pill bottle.

Whatever Liam does, he knows he needs to be quick. Zayn isn’t generally forgetful in this way, and even his swift, off-putting escape won’t keep him from the bag holding his wallet and keys and transit pass. He’ll return in minutes, if he’s not headed back already.

Liam hears the phantom thud of feet on the stairs before he pushes aside the paranoia and quests onward.

The bottle he grabs is buried at the bottom of the bag, in among coins and a capless pen whose end has been chewed up and some general grit. Liam fishes it out, still hunched over the bag on the floor as he examines the small print.

_Haloperidol,_ it reads.

He frowns, reaching to grab his mobile off the table, tapping open a search engine.

The detective has the mystifying jumble of letters neatly typed in, thumb hovering over the search button, when he hears footsteps for real. He crams the bottle back in the bag as he hears the unmistakably heavy tread of combat boots, shoving it all the way to the bottom before standing and walking backwards until he’s what he judges a non-suspicious distance from the rucksack. He’s barely turned toward the door, phone still in hand, when Zayn comes striding back in without preamble.

“Forgot this,” the boy mumbles, reaching down and swinging his bag over his shoulder. He looks at Liam, who’s currently stuffing his phone into his pocket with the display facing in, overly sensitive to where Zayn’s line of sight rests.

Zayn regards him for a moment in silence before pacing forward, muttering, “And this too,” and pressing a chaste kiss to Liam’s lips, hand delicate on his shoulder. He still smells like sex.

He pulls back in a heartbeat, gaze as unreadable as when he flew out the door post-fuck earlier. “I’ll see you later tonight, yeah?” he says, but it’s pitched more like a sincere question than a statement of fact. “Only leaving for a few hours.”

Inexplicably, Liam’s body feels about a thousand times lighter at the news, even as his mobile threatens to burn a hole in his trackies. “See you tonight,” he echoes.

Zayn gives him that penetrating stare again, pecks his lips once more, and vanishes into the hall, door snicking behind him.

After allowing himself to breathe in the bizarre, momentary lightness he’s feeling, Liam drags his mobile back out, unlocking it and finally, properly hitting the search button.

He taps the first link, brow furrowing as the page loads and he reads.

“Haldol,” he whispers to himself. He scrolls further, eyes widening and then narrowing in quick succession when he processes what the medical info is telling him. “Antipsyc—Zayn, what—?”

The treacherous, broken record in Liam’s head gets louder. To the backdrop of static confusion and a crescendo unpleasantly like dread, Liam hears it clearly for the first time all day.

_There’s shit right in front of you that you’re not even seeing._

_You’re not seeing._

_You’re not._

But he is.

 

Kloss’ text comes through as Liam brings his knuckles down in a perfunctory knock.

_You at the station yet?_ reads the message.

Liam types out a quick _Nah. Be in a bit late though, let others know please?_

His pocket buzzes what he can only assume is a confirmation just as the cheap pine door is opening, a tall, white-haired man in spectacles standing in the frame.

“Doctor Bloom?” Liam verifies, keeping his back straight.

A pleasant smile. “Indeed I am. And who might you be?”

Liam lets his cheeks round and go a bit pink when he says, “Detective Inspector Liam Payne, sir.” He peels back his jacket to flash his badge. 

The man chortles out a surprised little _oh!_ and extends his red hand. They shake; Liam is somehow unsurprised to find the man’s grasp dry and warm and fairly firm.

“Is there something I can help you with, Inspector?” Bloom asks, displacing his blazer to put his hands on his hips.

It’s not a confrontational gesture, just generally befuddled. Liam understands; it’s not terribly common for a DI to make an unscheduled visit to Queen Mary’s Department of Neurological Studies.

“It’s nothing severe,” Liam assures him. “We’re just looking into a few things regarding one of the doctoral candidates in your department.”

Bloom’s face moves through a series of expressions, consternation and surprise, then something like realization that makes Liam’s abdomen feel cold. The man lands on resolve, nodding once. “Please come in.”

The office is cramped with a desk and two chairs, filing cabinets and displays of cross-sections of brains. The walls are covered in diagrams and charts and posters. Liam notes a tour flyer with vague amusement. 

“Costello fan?” he asks, sitting in the chair Bloom indicates. Pleasantly quashy.

The man drops into the wheeled chair back behind his desk, nodding affably. “Saved music for the Americans, I reckon.” He shifts until he’s facing Liam dead-on, fingers steepled. “Was before your time, I suppose, but take my word for it.”

“I do,” Liam assures him, letting his smile twinkle a little.

The professor grins warmly, easily charmed. “Was a treat to hear him play. As you’d imagine. You have questions, though.”

The detective nods. “I do.”

“Which of my doctoral candidates are we here to discuss?” Bloom asks, cloudy blue eyes shrewd. “And in what context?”

“Uh,” Liam fumbles a bit. For all he’s prepared this, worked it through in his head until there’s a thick layer of professionalism separating him from the situation, it’s still far from comfortable.

Verges on painful.

“Zayn Malik,” he forces out. Liam’s always thought it’s a rather lovely name— _beautiful king,_ to translate directly. He’s never felt it drag so harshly over his tongue. “I’m here to ask you about your experiences with, uh, Zayn Malik.”

The way Bloom’s expression darkens does nothing for the dread flooding Liam’s body. He wills himself to keep distance. Perspective.

It could still be nothing.

“If you could just close the door for me,” Bloom requests, voice low and a bit strained.

Liam complies with numb fingers, the door clicking shut far more heavily than it has any right to.

“Thank you,” Bloom says, cordial.

Liam nods. He pulls his mobile from his jacket pocket and opens the voice memo. “May I?” he asks, finger hovering over the button.

Bloom frowns, confused, leaning forward until he realizes what Liam means to do. “Oh. Yes, that’s just fine.”

“Thank you,” Liam says. He exhales hard and presses the red button. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Yes,” the professor repeats, seemingly mulling it over. He tugs at the sleeve of his blazer, fiddling with a button. “Mr. Malik is, as I suspect you know, a bit of an outlier.”

Liam doesn’t laugh or smile or share one of a thousand stories that would illustrate just how well he knows what Bloom means. He nods, patient and encouraging. A sympathetic listener.

An ideal detective.

“He—” Bloom rubs his nose, gaze dropping from Liam’s for a moment before it returns and he begins again. “He first caught my attention when he took my lecture on…well, Neurobiology of Disease, it must have been.” The man licks his lips. “He’s rather young. I imagine you must know that. Immensely gifted. I remember thinking he was a bit baby-faced, though he’s grown into it since I first met him.” The man quirks a smile. “Handsome lad.” He shifts a bit, eyes growing distant. “When he first walked into that lecture hall, I figured he must have the wrong class.”

Liam imagines it. Zayn at eighteen, face softer and free of stubble. Arms bare save for a small collection of ink, a starter pack for the nearly full sleeve of art he possesses at almost twenty-one. Shuffling into a massive lecture hall at one of the country’s most lauded universities and sprawling back in a seat, doodling without conscious thought between notes in trademark scrawl. Diligent, even when he’s playing at careless.

There’s something the detective is having trouble picturing, though. “Where did he sit?” he asks. It comes out softer than intended, blanketed in warmth. He tries to downplay it by flattening his expression, keeping his eyes only faintly interested.

He never does get to hear much about Zayn’s life before they met.

“Ah, he’s a front of the room kind of lad,” the professor says with a wave of his hand. “Studious as hell. Though,” he pauses, expression falling a bit, “not terribly social, I’m afraid.”

That—seems off. It doesn’t line up with the boy that Liam knows, all effervescent energy at the station and lilting, magnetic speech in the pub down the road and luminous amusement across the table at the Thai place two streets down from Liam’s flat.

“Not terribly social,” Liam repeats.

The man’s expression scrunches as he grapples with the language to explain. “Not—rude, particularly. Only I do believe he made one chap cry once before lecture, not sure what the story was there. And he refused to do partnered assignments. Went over the syllabus and told me, point-blank, that he would be skipping every day he would be required to work with someone else.”

Liam snorts. Can’t help it, really, the image of teenaged Zayn stone-faced and unapologetic before his neurology professor dancing through his brain.

“What was your response?” the detective asks. He knows what his own would be; Zayn does best with ultimatums and consequence, privileges that can be revoked. Things he values more than self-interest. People willing to tell him _no_.

“Well,” Bloom says, “after I stopped laughing, I told him that was just fine, provided he didn’t mind failing the course.”

The detective feels his lips curve up a touch. “Did that fix it?”

With a scoff, Bloom shakes his head. “He got a position as a lab assistant in the department that semester and earned the points back.” The man makes a thoughtful noise. “Meticulous, that one. Not convinced he’ll pursue procedural work, but he’d be an asset in anyone’s lab.”

It wounds something in Liam’s chest to even ask, but. “He get a lot of practical experience in the lab, then?”

“Oh God, yes,” Bloom says, nodding vigorously. “Was a bit of a workhorse there.”

Liam swallows heavily. “Can you name some of the—work, he was part of?” He keeps his hands intentionally still, refuses to let any fidgeting give away how much pressure weighs on Bloom’s response.

“Well,” the man shifts forward, primed to explain the subject he’s devoted his life to, “a lot of it was work with the frontal lobe—expression of emotions, memory, all that. But there were other projects. Mr. Malik is a dual doctoral candidate, in both neurology and biology. That gave him a rather helpful range of skills in the lab. Competence in scan analysis, as well as dissection.” Bloom snorts and plays with the band around his finger as he says, “That combination is dismayingly rare, as it happens. Someone able to handle both raw data and raw tissue.”

Liam feels cold all over. “Dissection of what variety, if I may ask.” His tone doesn’t have that interviewer’s clip to it anymore. It grates out from behind his teeth, syllables dragging with how much he doesn’t want to know. Can’t stand knowing.

Has to.  

“Uh…” Gaze shifting to recall, Bloom draws out the sound. Then, “Suppose it would have been study of pathogens as affecting vital organs versus the brainstem. That was the program fall of last year. He was good at it—steady hands. Precision was important. A lot of—carving pieces out, if you will.”

Jesus fuck. “I see,” Liam manages over the swelling of his tongue, the pounding in his head. “Um, we’re about done, I think, but if there’s anything else you’d like to add—?”

Bloom nods. “Right, right. Well. If you’re looking for more info—maybe someone who talks to him outside of the classroom—his research advisor is really the one to speak with. I’ll give you her info if you haven’t tracked her down yet.”

“Yeah, that’d be—thank you,” Liam fumbles, stuffing the post-it into his pocket as he stands abruptly. “Doctor Bloom, thank you so much, uh, for your time,” he rushes automatically. “That about covers it, I’ll let you get—”

“He’s a bit…” Bloom squints as he pushes up out of his chair slowly, tone considering. “…troubled, I think. Maybe not playing by the same rules as the rest of us. It’s—it’s just a feeling, not something I could explicitly prove.” He shrugs slightly, looking at Liam with light eyes. “Almost didn’t mention it. Not exactly empirical, is it?”

“No, it’s…” Liam’s lungs are punctured and collapsing, he’s rather sure. “It’s useful to know. Thank you.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.” The man smiles, seemingly unbothered by the conversation that’s sent Liam spinning. “Take care, Inspector.”

Liam wishes him a good day as he slips his mobile back into his jacket. He leaves quickly, suddenly claustrophobic in the tight halls of the faculty building.

His hands jitter a bit as he types in a title for the audio of the interview, a date followed by the professor’s name. He saves it, nearly opting to send it to his e-mail out of habit.

This isn’t an official interview, though. This isn’t even his work mobile. Liam would do a scary amount of shit, probably, to keep this out of the official evidence bank.

Because it could still mean nothing. It could. The detective is keenly interested in keeping Zayn’s involvement in the case to a minimum until he’s sorted through his own curiosities, indistinct enough that he can’t really even call them suspicions.

_Troubled,_ Bloom had called him. Liam can’t deny it, has seen yellowing bruises mar Zayn’s skin too many times to do so, but it’s. It’s not the whole story, is it?

Searches on Haloperidol had yielded results that led Liam to treatment, chiefly, of schizophrenia. He’d nearly been comforted by the information—there’s still so much stigma surrounding the illness and it would explain, at least, why Zayn might opt for secrecy—until he remembered the Price case and the triple homicide. The worst possible outcome, truly, but not unheard of.

Still. Zayn _isn’t_ Kennedy Price, isn’t twitchy and nervous and neglected. Isn’t struggling the way those left to self-manage sometimes sorrowfully become.

_Not playing by the same rules,_ though. It’s something to consider.

He shuffles into the office an hour and a half later than he normally would, unsurprised to find everyone already accounted for. Horan offers him a little three-finger wave in greeting and Kloss nods from over by the coffee maker.

Tomlinson is conspicuously silent, eyes flickering up only briefly before he returns to typing something out where he sits on the sofa.

Liam’s mouth twitches down, just slightly. “Cabello,” he calls, “what’d they turn up in the Hueffed suicide?”

“Uh…” Cabello looks up, pushing her dark hair out of her face. “Gimme a minute, wasn’t sure when…you’d be in…” She shuffles through papers on her desk, lip between her teeth while she searches.

Liam helps himself to the tepid coffee as he waits. Light bounces off the dark liquid in a way that reminds him of something. There’s a hot twinge of recollection as he realizes what.

A stutter wracks his movements as he types the message, still shaky from the Bloom interview or simply full of unspent lightning from thinking about Zayn at all, he can’t tell.

_Your eyes go extra dark when you’re getting ploughed, by the way._ He sends it before he can think too hard about it, heat pooling in his gut at the fresh memory.

There’s no reply before Cabello is striding over and handing him the report on Samuel Hueffed, found dead by hanging in his flat by Detective Inspector Payne.

“Fairly standard,” Cabello informs him. “Dude lived alone. Had a few bills he was behind on. Not especially tidy. Average amount of activity on social media. Y’know.”

Liam flips through the stapled pages, considering. “Nothing suspicious as far as cash? No major deposits in any accounts, no…very, very full piggy bank?”

“Not that they found.” The woman stretches her arms behind her head, peering down at the page Liam is perusing. “His phone was blank, though.”

“Blank how?” The detective traces a thumb over the photo of Hueffed’s bedroom clipped to the page, the Muhammad Ali poster visible on the wall with one of the man’s quotes in white boldface. _It’s just a job,_ it reads, but Liam can’t make out the rest in the glare of light through the bedroom window.

“Blank like the SIM card was gone.” Cabello shrugs. “No evidence of it in with the rubbish, so the best guess is that he flushed it before he—” she makes a choking noise, dropping her head forward and lifting to her toes as she raises a fist above her head.

Liam eyes her over the top of the folder. “That’s vile,” he says mildly.

“You _asked,_ ” Cabello grumbles, and trots away.

The DI is left to ponder it.

No large cash transfers—the man’s transaction records show only small, incidental deposits and similar withdrawals at an ATM near his flat, and the flat itself is apparently free of any sizeable wads of bills—and no info on his recent mobile activity.

The bit on the mobile is interesting, but not necessarily a lead. Hangings are pre-meditated by nature; if the man had anything embarrassing or tawdry he didn’t want getting out—or if, perversely, he wished to protect the identities of the felons he was leaving behind—that would be a pretty standard solution.

The lack of cash is suspicious, though, and it could make the mobile detail relevant. From what Cabello had gathered in her undercover interview, the arson gang’s services don’t come cheap. While it’s possible the entire deal was conducted in cash, the fact that Hueffed doesn’t seem to have retained any of the profit—nor possess any recently acquired objects that would have cost him a large sum—is suspect. 

Why be the middleman between a murderer and a gang of arsonists without ensuring a cut?

Liam’s phone vibrates on his desk as he considers it.

_Arousal causes pupil dilation,_ the message reads, _surely I don’t have to explain that to you._

_If I promise to pay attention to the lecture can there be a practical examination?_ he returns. There’s a knot of something in his chest that loosens as he thinks of the way Zayn will roll his eyes when he reads the text, the undignified little snort he’ll let out if no one’s around to hear it.

Which brings to mind another question. _Where are you, anyway? Lecture? Actual lecture, not sex lecture._

_Skiving,_ reads the reply. _It’s all reviews for exams, I was going to start strangling people with my shoelace if I had to listen to their questions._ A moment later, as an aside, _So fucking inane._

Liam frowns. _Where are you now?_

The detective doesn’t like to think—sincerely doesn’t believe—that he’s morphed into some overbearing warden of Zayn’s life, but. He’s far touchier about the boy’s whereabouts than he was before the appearance of the note naming him.

Only natural to worry. Achingly. Constantly.

_Around,_ comes the reply. Liam’s fingers tingle.

_Are you in a public place? Where are you headed?_

He jots down three lines of distracted notes on the Hueffed file, writing sloppy with how little he’s thinking about it, before Zayn replies.

_Well gee dad, I’m not sure yet, but I promise I’ll ring mum if I can’t make it home for tea._

_That’s not funny._ He sets his mobile on the desk with perhaps more force than necessary.

There’s a lot of standard detail on Hueffed in his case file. His record of employ lists him as between jobs at the time of his suicide—officially, anyway. The consistent deposits to his account have Liam suspecting he was making ends meet via work with the arsonists and their clients.

It needs connective plausibility beyond the word of the gang’s leader, though. The detective itches at the hair near his ear as he looks over the other details, hoping something will jump out. His gaze flickers to his mobile, hand idly bending the file in his grasp.

Five minutes, and Zayn doesn’t reply.

_Thinking salad for dinner,_ he types out, tapping the send icon neatly.

He’s not; Zayn had attempted to drop all of Liam’s bowls out his window the last time he’d suggested it. Called it a preventative measure.

“Preventative against what?” Liam demanded, prying a mixing bowl out of Zayn’s grip.

“ _Salad,_ Liam.” Zayn climbed off the back of the couch but left the window open. “Preventative against salad.” He had pulled out his mobile, curving slightly into Liam’s hand on his hip where they stood in the middle of the room. “Let’s order pasta.”

Liam would settle for a _let’s not_ at this point, finds his fingers tapping a rapid beat inches from his mobile’s dark screen.

He tries not to let it set his teeth on edge.

Midday rolls around; Horan grabs lunch and offers the other DI a hearty wink when he hands him his order. Liam finds himself actively seeking out busywork, certain that if he’s given the opportunity he’ll navigate to Zayn’s number and call until the boy is forced to answer and at least confirm he’s still alive enough to be annoyed.

He’s not sure what Zayn thinks he’s doing, falling out of communication. The afternoon becomes an exercise in sterile, office-appropriate torment, filled with gruesome images he barely has to think on to call to mind in perfect, visceral detail: cracked ribs, exposed organs. Sable skin parted so, so evenly.

It’s no effort at all for his mind to transpose a set of inked wings onto the image, split in two by an exacting blade to expose what lies beneath. The splash of red in the shape of a kiss dimmed by the overwhelming red within.

Liam swallows against the taste of bile, the tendons in his wrists tightening like rubber bands. He stares at his paperwork and does aimless tasks and tries not to see crimson behind his eyelids.

It’s a losing battle. Hours pass where it seems mere breaths separate him from falling apart over it, breaking something or jumping out the nearest window just for the psychic release.

Ultimately, though, it’s Delevingne who loses it first.

“Stop,” she demands, hand coming down hard on her desk. Her brow furrows as she stares straight ahead for a moment before looking up from her computer slowly. Her frown deepens when her eyes land on where Liam is standing off to the side of his desk, shuffling papers. “Fuck’s sake, Liam, I said I’d have this done tonight and I can’t do that with you _hovering about._ ”

Liam takes a step back, papers clutched to his chest. “I’m not hovering.”

“You are, though,” Delevingne sighs. Then, “I adore you, you know that, but you need to unclench from whatever’s had to screwed up all day.”

The exchange is quiet enough that it’s lost on the others under the noise of their own projects, follow-ups and assignments that send them skittering out of the room at odd intervals.

Amongst the comforting bustle of their colleagues, the detective stands silent, not sure what to say. A moment passes before he settles on the truth. Liam may be her superior most days of the week, but Cara is a mate.

“Zayn stopped responding to texts,” he tells her heavily. His heart thuds unpleasantly with the words, the dread he’s been pushing down all day.

A beat of silence where the sergeant only blinks up at him, owlish eyes wholly unimpressed.

“You’ve been climbing up our collective arsehole all day,” she says slowly, “because a boy isn’t texting you back?”

Liam bristles. “He’s been named by a serial murderer in an ongoing investigation, Delevingne. He lives above a crime scene.”

The woman scowls. “Don’t _Delevingne_ me,” she says, waspish. “You’re not _Inspector_ worried, you’re _boyfriend_ worried.”

“He’s not—why is it that you think you know what kind of worried I am?” Liam demands.

“Because you’ve been a meter from me all fucking day,” Cara tells him on caustic laugh. “Fuck, Li, if it’s getting to you that bad why don’t you just go see him? Fix whatever you think you fucked up.” She turns back to her computer. “You spend too much time here, anyway.”

Liam wants to listen to her, but. “I work here,” he informs her weakly. “Most hours, actually. Sort of a fulltime thing.”

“Yes, well, you’re fulltime riding my arse,” Delevingne informs him. Her mouth twitches with the suggestion of a smile. “Your talents are better appreciated elsewhere.”

There’s no good response Liam can fling from the back of his tongue, so he ignores the remark and regards his desk.

His work. Such as there is.

He presses the home button on his phone. No new messages.

“And that wouldn’t be an issue, if I took off for the day,” he verifies quietly. “You lot would be okay?”

Liam fancies he can see Cara’s eyes roll through the top of her head. “Yes, dad, we’d somehow muddle through.”

“I’d appreciate,” Liam says as he turns back toward his desk, “if people would stop calling me that.” He collects his things quickly, everything accounted for as he types out another message to Zayn. _Will you do me a favor and answer me? Literally at all._

Every second without a response brings the sensation of mercury dripping down his stomach lining, cold and toxic.

Liam is most of the way to the door and just hitting send when he hears the snide remark over his shoulder.

“But the investigation is still the priority, right.”

He freezes. Feels the remark scrape down each nub of his spine.

There’s the sound of the rest of the team doing their jobs, the printer working and someone calling records for info. Liam is aware, through the thickening haze of anger, that this is neither the time nor place.

Not the time to take Tomlinson to task. Not the place to punch his face in.

Horan speaks before he can do anything ill-advised. “Tommo,” the man says softly, quiet reproach in the fold of his syllables.

Liam doesn’t turn—doesn’t need to, sees through sheer familiarity the expression of open-mouthed betrayal Tomlinson must be directing at Niall right now. His breath is hot as it rushes out his nose after each slow inhale, nerves sparking while he works to get his temper under control.

Cabello’s voice breaks the tension of the moment, a head of shiny, dark hair appearing at the detective’s side and waving a manila folder.

She thrusts the file at Liam. “If you’re heading off to question his professors, take these with you,” she says, “see if the bisections ring any bells.”

The man blinks twice. “What?” he rasps out.

There’s no way she knows about where Liam was this morning, his rapidly overheating brain screeches. She can’t.

Cabello blinks back. “The...” She frowns and squints, mouth slightly ajar. “You’re going to go talk to Hueffed’s professors, right?”

It’s possible this conversation is happening in an alien language. “What are you talking about?” Liam asks, hoping the vague panic he’s still breathing through isn’t bleeding into his tone.

“The—Hueffed, the _dead guy,_ ” Cabello says. She waves the envelope insistently, like that helps. “His professors? At Queen Mary? They might have some insight into whether he could have pulled it off.”

“Queen—” Liam shakes his head like a dog after a swim. “What does the university have to do—?”

“Did you even _read_ the initial file?” Cabello demands. “Sorry, just. _Did_ you?”

Liam scowls. “You know I did.”

“Right, well, read it again,” she says, “and look at his educational profile this time.” She huffs out a little breath, blowing wayward hair out of her face. “Sir.”

There’s still a phantom itch in Liam’s fingers, the desire to check his phone to see if Zayn has thought to indicate he’s not dead in an alley somewhere and is simply a massive dick who lives to make Liam’s life a hellscape. He can ignore it, though, for the time it takes to get on the same page as his team. Pick up the ball he’s clearly dropped.

Tomlinson’s spiteful remark rings between Liam’s ears as he strides back to his desk and snatches the abandoned file up.

The investigation is still the priority. Over—everything. Has to be.

He finds the relevant section quickly enough—feels a flash of chagrin at not noticing it, obvious on the clean white printout—and reads quickly.

Samuel Hueffed, third year graduate student at Queen Mary. Student in School of—

Liam feels a fist lodge itself into his windpipe as he reads it, over and over again.

_School of Biological and Chemical Sciences,_ it reads.

“Cabello,” Liam strangles out, keeping his voice strident even as it yearns to go high and panicky, “his professors, you said—”

“I figured you’d wanna interview them, yeah,” she says, sidling up to the detective where he rigidly stands.  “Given that he’s a suspect.”

“A sus—” Liam cuts himself off, eyes sliding closed as he realizes.

Hueffed could have lied to the chavs with the lighter fluid, paid them off to do his work for him and told them it was someone else’s dirty laundry. Which would be why he wasn’t receiving a cut as the middle man—there _was_ no middle man, no higher-up to siphon cash from before moving the transaction along. Of course he’d dispose of the missing SIM card, the most damning piece of evidence they would likely ever get, with the boat destroyed and no other vehicle recovered—the killer was more concerned with covering his tracks than anything. And it would explain offing himself once it became clear the Met was closing in. He was too obsessed with control to ever allow himself to be captured.

It adds up.

A finger pokes Liam’s bicep. He rubs at the spot distractedly, opening his bleary eyes. The day is heavier, suddenly.

“Liam,” Cabello says, concern hazy mauve in her voice. “Are you alright?”

He should have seen that. He should have made the connection, spotted the possibility the second he walked into that flat reeking of defeat and decay.

_Warmest regards,_ murmurs the killer’s silent voice in his mind.

“How did I not…did we _discuss_ this?” he asks, winded.

Cabello frowns. “Louis didn’t tell you?”

“ _Loui—_ ” Liam breathes, swallowing his anger. He can be a professional, here. He can.

He can deal with arsehole pathologists on his own time.

“Never, never mind Louis.” He breathes out hard. “Does that mean—” Liam clears the thickness from his throat. Tries again. “D’you have a lock on Hueffed’s class schedule, then?”

A small, quick nod from the sergeant, eyes still intent on Liam. “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been—I figured you must be heading to speak to them, since you’re leaving so early.” She catches Liam’s stricken expression and tacks on, “For you, I mean.”

“I’ve been…” Liam rubs a hand down his face slowly, feels the scratch of incipient 5 o’clock shadow. “…fucking useless, all day.” He shakes his head slowly. “Don’t give me the benefit of assuming I was being productive. Please.”

Cabello makes a small noise Liam is forced to register as a soft, sad _aw._ “You’ve been hitting it rather hard lately,” she tries. “Maybe you need—”

“Don’t,” Liam cuts off. He grimaces a little at the look it puts on Cabello’s face. “Sorry. Just. I don’t need a break.”

She shrugs. “I was going to say _bubble bath,_ but good to know where your head’s at.”

The detective flicks her very lightly in the shoulder. “Grab me his schedule, if you could.”

She does, offering the sheet between two fingers. Liam tugs it out of her grip, eyes darting across the page.

It takes seconds to see it.

There’s a tense, airless moment before Liam is shoving Hueffed’s schedule back at Cabello and murmuring, “Would you excuse me.”

Bad traffic does nothing for Liam’s stripped nerves. His pulse is nearly painful where it hammers away under the thin skin of his wrists, at his temple where he’s got his mobile wedged between his shoulder and ear.

_“You’ve reached Zayn. Leave a message,”_ comes the recording, followed by the apathetic little beep.

“Babe, I need you to call me,” Liam strains into the receiver. “As soon as you can, please just—call.”

He fumbles the phone off his shoulder and into the passenger seat, eyes never leaving the road. Fat drops of liquid start smacking the windshield, bright contrast in the headlights to the wintry night that’s coming on far too rapidly as of late.

The detective taps his palms against the steering wheel frenetically, trying to dispel the coiled tension in his system.

Bloom. Sam Hueffed had a class with Professor Bloom of Queen Mary University, Monday and Wednesday mornings.

_Advanced Molecular Neurobiology._ Liam hates how cleanly the words ring in his mind, the soft timbre he can’t help but hear them in. 

They’re familiar, is the thing.

He races up the flights of stairs quickly enough to startle a woman coming down, tossing an apology over his shoulder without stopping.

Slowing to a stop in front of the door, it occurs to Liam that he might have wanted to plan out his approach, here. Accusations will get him nowhere, but something’s got to fucking _give._

His knuckles have barely brushed the door when it opens.

Liam feels relief saturate his bones like morphine at the sight of Zayn standing in the doorway.

“Li,” he says mildly, surprised only in the very slightest. He’s in a light jumper, hair soft and unstyled, tousled where it meets the frames of his glasses. The strap of his rucksack cuts diagonal across his torso.

He’s whole and unharmed and _right here,_ and Liam—he momentarily forgets what had him rushing like mad to get here.

Until Zayn’s expression tilts, goes a little sour, and he says, “Little early for you to be off, isn’t it?”

It floods back, acidic and terrible as it rushes through the detective’s brain. He wonders briefly what neurotransmitter is responsible for fury. “Why didn’t you tell me that Sam Hueffed was in your class?”

There’s a pause which Liam gives his elevated breathing—loud in the silent hallway—and which Zayn gives nothing at all.

The detective supposes he ought to be used to that by now.

Zayn speaks, careless boulders tumbling off a cliff’s edge. “I was just leaving,” he says, moving to shoulder past Liam, out the door.

“Yeah?” Liam asks, resting a hand against the doorframe and cutting off the boy’s means of escape. “Where were you headed? Don’t suppose you’ll tell me, but,” he shrugs, jagged feigned indifference, “at least this way I can watch you avoid the question.”

“Where is all this coming from?” Zayn demands, stepping back two paces. “First all the messages, now you’ve shown up to give me the third degree—”

“I showed up because you were implicated as a target in a _serial murder case,_ Zayn, and you haven’t responded to my messages all day.” He’s leaning forward a bit, he realizes, rounding his shoulders and straightening his spine to create a size difference between them that isn’t usually so prominent.

“So what, you’re worried?” Zayn quizzes, expression nearly as baffled as it is annoyed. “We have ten hours where we’re not breathing down each other’s necks and you lose your mind? You’re a _cop,_ Liam, you’re meant to be made of stronger stuff.”

It’s a dig, and Liam is thinking he might make Zayn answer for it, but there’s something bigger, here. “I’m going to ask you again,” he says, voice low and ominously precise. “Why didn’t you tell me Sam Hueffed was in your lecture.”

“You never asked,” Zayn dismisses.

Liam slams his fist against the door, gratified in the ugliest way when Zayn lurches back with the bang.

“I didn’t ask because I had no way to _know,_ ” he shouts. “Do you know what happens to people who consciously withhold information from ongoing investigations?”

“Oh, this is all a bit familiar, isn’t it,” Zayn drawls, recovering the ground he’s lost from the doorway to get right back up in Liam’s face. “Last time you threatened me with the law, do you remember how that worked out for you?”

Liam’s jaw clicks. This close, he can smell Zayn, his detergent and cologne and hair product. Can see that damnable freckle in his left eye when he holds his unrepentant gaze. 

“Not gonna fuck your way out of this one, love,” he says. “Forgiven isn’t forgotten.”

“I’ve multiple offenses, that it?” Zayn returns. Liam feels the slightest ghost of fingers at his belt loop, the suggestion of a tug there. “Are we talking about the court of law or your personal feelings on the matter?” Zayn leans in, lips centimeters from Liam’s own. God, he can practically taste him like this. “Because I gotta tell you, Liam, I don’t think the courts take too kindly to willfully allowing a civilian access to classified files.” Zayn blinks, slow and inescapable, an avalanche in miniature. “Think you know that, too.”

Liam swallows against the bone dryness of his throat. “You’re too smart to act like it just _didn’t occur to you_ to bring the Hueffed connection up,” he says quietly, nearly directly onto Zayn’s lips. “So why didn’t you?”

Zayn is quiet again, breathing in tandem with Liam as he considers his response. If Liam brought his hand down from the doorframe, he could wrap it around Zayn’s narrow waist and pull them into each other, feel more than just the suggestion of the boy’s body heat. Could crush their mouths together and revel in the flutter of Zayn’s blood thumping under his skin. Proof that he’s real, and he’s here, and he’s Liam’s in at least one way.

But then, if Liam lowers his arm, that gives Zayn the chance to leave.

Which is absolutely not an option.

“I was scared.”

It’s nearly a whisper, delicate in the quiet hall. Zayn’s eyes fall shut after a moment like he’s pained by the admission, full bottom lip tucked between his teeth. “If I admitted I knew Sam, and it turned out he’d done it…you’d. You’d think he was trying to get to you through _me,_ and.” Zayn swallows. “I can’t easily imagine anything less appealing than being with someone whose classmate had a fucking murder obsession with you. Who was—closing in. Using that connection.” Zayn’s face screws up as his eyes open, disquiet warring with disbelief under the fluorescent lights. “Using _me._ ”

The flames dancing under Liam’s skin sizzle out, doused in something cold and a little heady. “Zayn,” he breathes.

The boy shrugs, looking caged even with his expression blown open. “And I knew—like, I know I’m constantly taking the piss but—you’re actually a very, very good detective, you know? Knew it’d take no time for you to figure it out, once you got a lock on who Sam was.” Zayn shakes his head a bit. “Of course I was avoiding you.”

Liam stands with his mouth open like he’s going to say something. All that comes out is a weak squeaking noise.

They stand there in stalemate for a moment before Zayn scratches at the side of his nose and says, “I was headed to the library, can you—”

With a jolt, Liam lowers his arm from the doorframe. Zayn edges past him, eyes downward.

“Zayn,” Liam says again. The boy pauses, still close enough that Liam could put a hand on his waist, rub circles into the skin under his shirt like he would drag his thumb across damp clay.

Zayn isn’t clay right now. Zayn is sharp, brittle bone, wearing the distrust Liam breathed into him like a shroud of smoke.

The boy doesn’t look up to see how Liam looks when he says his name so pleadingly, but his head cocks very slightly toward him.

“I shouldn’t have come at you like that,” the detective says quietly. “I—shouldn’t have come here at all.” He lets out a strangled noise, some distant relation of laughter. “Clearly.”

Zayn hitches his bag a little higher, capturing Liam with the full weight of his stare. Each small step he takes backward down the hall sends a shock of bereavement through the detective, standing askance with his arms hanging useless at his sides.

“Be here when I get back,” Zayn says, quiet and direct.

Liam nods. “When’ll that be?” he asks.

“Be here,” Zayn repeats, and disappears down the stairway like a lantern blinking out.

Slumping with an exhale that feels too choppy to do its job properly, Liam lets himself slide down the wall beside Zayn’s door. It’s locked; the door is always locked, if Zayn isn’t in. Liam has never thought to ask for a key. Doesn’t really need one, usually has Zayn waiting on the other side, twitchy with impatience, or else sliding into the little alcove of the doorway to turn the lock while he spills his scientific prose, enthralls Liam with the chemical makeup of his favorite carnelian acrylic.

There’s nothing but marked silence where the mellifluous lecture usually goes. That’s fine. That’s good.

It’s time Liam can use.

He fishes a sliver of bright paper, folded lengthwise, out of the front pocket of his bag. Fumbles it around until the numbers are facing the right way. The edges are already softening from the heat of his nervous fingers as he holds it, other hand typing the numbers into his work mobile.

It rings once. “Hello?” comes a clipped voice, strident in a way Liam isn’t expecting.

“Hello, I’m looking for Lila Cooke?” He’s still staring at the post-it, Bloom’s measured handwriting. Liam lets his vision drift, focuses on the meeting of hard hallway carpet and the wall opposite him.

He lets his vision blur and sharpen as the woman says, “I’m Lila,” like she’s defensive about it. “Who is this?”

Liam doesn’t let his tone droop the way his head does while he talks. “This is Detective Inspector Payne with the Metropolitan Police.” He folds the post-it with the edge of two fingers. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about a student in the doctoral program under your advisement.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” the woman snaps. “I don’t enjoy being jerked around.”

There’s a press of annoyance at the bridge of Liam’s nose, behind his eyes. “If you check your caller ID you’ll find the prefix of this number is registered specifically with the Met. Not available for outside use,” he offers as patiently as possible.

There’s a brief silence, likely Lila checking, and then a hiss of air that must be her exhale. “This about Zayn, then?” she demands. “What’s he done now?”

Two reactions flare in Liam’s body, warring for control and leaving him, he’s sure, with all manner of internal bruising. One is a throbbing sort of annoyance which lies rooted in attempting to defend someone who wills themselves toward indefensibility, always brash, always on the edge of unacceptable. The other is a cold, sluicing unease.

“Mr. Malik hasn’t been charged with anything,” Liam says carefully. “Anything at all. However, I’d appreciate it if we could meet and conduct a brief interview in person regarding your—experiences, with him.”

“Interview,” Lila says, wondering and with a bit of condescension. Liam decides he fully understands the heavy distaste Zayn always lavishes mentions of her with. “Is this a _mandatory_ interview, then?” she asks in that biting tone. “Am I going to be summoned for questioning and dragged down to the station if I don’t say yes?”

“It’s a bit less formal than that,” Liam assures her. “It’s really just a few standard—”

“How’s this,” the woman cuts across. “Zayn Malik is a self-important, megalomaniacal _arsehole,_ and the only reason anyone in the department puts up with him is because he’s a certifiable genius and his research proposal is the kind of grandiose tripe that makes donors line up at the door.”

Liam is—stunned, by the outpouring of venom, by the idea that Zayn could have pushed this woman so far to have her anger nearly tangible at his mere mention. Sure, he’s not particularly concerned with how his actions affect others, can be a little prickly, a little sharp, but he’s—he’s still—

“Lila, you’ve already been immensely helpful,” he tells the woman, a soothing untruth to calm her ire, “and I’m happy to let you get back to your evening, but if you could tell me about this research proposal—?”

“Yes, fine,” she says with an audible sigh, signaling just how taxing she finds the act of continually interrupting, “but it’s a bit complicated, so I hope you’re rather quick.”

“I’ll do my best,” Liam assures her, strained.

Within seconds, the detective is certain the woman is working to make Zayn’s research proposal sound more complex than it is. It’s different from the boy’s quixotic musings, lyrical and clear. She draws out certain technical terms as if to bait Liam’s into asking what they mean, dresses up simple phrases to make them seem more convoluted than they are.

Liam suspects she would have made a decent student of English.

After she’s finished the short tirade, Liam licks over his lips once. “So, essentially,” he starts, “he’s exploring ways in which the human body can sustain without vital organs.”

A harsh snort. “Roughly speaking, yes.”

Liam nods to himself and hits the end call button without ceremony. He leverages himself to his feet, knees protesting after being bent for so long, and turns to one of the cement columns in the hall.

He can’t help the short, enraged noise that escapes him as he hurls the mobile against the cement. The impact shatters it, bends the frame. Its pieces scatter across the floor, glass sharp and glittering in the pale carpeting like a photo negative of stars.

For so simple a motion, Liam is left heaving breaths, nearly choking on another scream until it gets forced down and down and turns to stomach acid.

_Be here,_ Zayn had so softly commanded, but Liam can’t right now. He can’t yell the way he wants in this hallway, can’t tear something apart the way his limbs crave.

Such a violent sensation, attempting to reject unwanted knowledge.

He’s exactly halfway through a fresh pack of cigarettes when Zayn finally appears at the edge of his vision, coming up the sidewalk with the slightest scuffle of boots. They watch each other quietly as the boy draws nearer, an inconstant silhouette under the streetlights.

When he’s close enough, he snags the cigarette out of Liam’s loose grip without preamble. Liam sighs out the last plume of smoke, resigned, then nearly chokes on the taste of ash as he watches Zayn’s plush lips wrap around the end of it.

The boy inhales easily, eyes lulling nearly closed and sending spidery shadows from his lashes down the planes of his face, angles sharpened by the harsh overhead light on the building’s auxiliary entrance.

It’s a breathless second—truly breathless, because how can Zayn _breathe_ through lungs full of pungent toxin, Liam wonders frantically—until he exhales. He breathes out slow enough to let the smoke fall from his lips, fat plumes curling upward and offering a fleeting veil between Liam and the piercing exactitude of his eyes.

The detective is suspended in the moment, his own clean exhales showing in the frigid air. Zayn takes another long drag from the cigarette, eyes never erring from Liam’s, and the man feels his hand twitch at his side, like he might smack the cigarette away from Zayn’s lips.

Somewhere outside of his control, his mouth voicelessly forms the word _don’t._

Zayn pulls the fag from his mouth, turning to stare out at the green separating his flat building from the campus. His eyes flicker back to Liam as smoke leaks from his nostrils, and Liam has always thought of him as a raven, something dark and sharp and clever, but right now he sees a dragon. Eyes bright as fire, smoke curling to his ears like a cruel smile.

He’s not smiling, though. Zayn is silent and closed-lipped as he steps up into Liam’s space, on his toes to compensate for the step Liam stands on, and presses their lips together.

Liam’s eyes slide closed a beat after Zayn’s do, and there’s no attempt to make the kiss deeper or dirtier, just cold lips on cold lips with cold smoke leaking at the seams.

Then Zayn whispers slowly, like a promise, “These are made to kill you.” Blue spills up off his lips and into Liam’s nostrils, fills him up with its potent threat. “And you will die if you can’t let them go.”

His voice is blue, too. Raspy from the way he’s held the smoke in torturously long, absolutely beautiful in a way Liam never wants to hear again.

He captures Zayn’s wrist without moving his face at all, keeps them close enough he could lick at the smoke twisting out of Zayn’s mouth. He pulls the fag from his grip and drops it, crushing it with the toe of his boot.

Zayn’s eyes are still closed when he smiles. “That’s better, Detective Inspector.”

_Self-important, megalomaniacal arsehole,_ shrills an echo in Liam’s mind.

It’s silenced when he kisses Zayn until the taste of smoke is lost.

 

Liam knocks twice, mechanical, and is met with the cream-colored door opening just as efficiently.

There’s a moment where Louis’ eyes go wide and he tries to shut the door, but they’ve known each other for years, now, and it thunks uselessly off Liam’s boot.

“Tomlinson,” Liam reprimands. “Open your bloody door.”

From behind the wood, Liam hears voices murmuring a tad urgently. He squints. It’s ten on a Thursday night, and Louis lives alone. If he has company, it’s most likely—

“Hey Liam,” Styles greets loosely, peering with his tangled hair and flushed cheeks around the door before there’s another hissed reprimand from Louis and he disappears again.

“Styles,” Liam greets anyway.

After a moment, the door flings back open. Louis stands there, hair a wreck and vest skewed on his chest, boxers inside out.

If Liam wasn’t here to ream him out, essentially, he’d laugh.

“Something you needed?” the pathologist says, too even for how debauched he looks. His foot scratches over one of his bare ankles.

Liam cuts to the chase. “You were meant to tell me we were considering Hueffed our lead suspect.”

Louis’ chin tips up, defiant. “I was.”

“And you didn’t.”

A heavy pause. “No.”

There’s a vacuum of silence, nothing to fill the space where easy familiarity and brotherhood usually rests.

“Is that because—” Liam’s voice wavers, which cannot be a thing that happens right now. He stops, swallows once, and asks. “Is that because you think there’s a better option on the table, then?”

The question drops, echoes not at all in the short hallway, and Louis looks suddenly so very tired. “Yeah,” he says quietly, regretfully. “Yeah, Li, I really do.”

It’s not what the detective wants. He doesn’t _want_ this, the seething, desperate plea in his chest, the desire to grab Louis’ bare shoulders and _shake him_ , make him see it differently with those sharp blue eyes that are so seldom wrong.

He wants to scream for him to take it back. Un-think the thought, un-root the seed of doubt in Liam’s mind.

Liam’s jaw aches, a precursor to the sting in his eyes. “You saying that as a professional or a mate?”

“I’m saying that as a professional,” Louis says, laying the words out carefully, “to a mate.”

No blame has been absolved—Louis willfully obstructed Liam’s ability to do his job, and Liam isn’t blind to the accusation of his words—but it’s personal betrayal Liam feels, now, something watery and burning all at once.

“Colleague,” Liam says quietly. “Just leave it at colleague for now. Please.”

Louis’— _Tomlinson’s_ —expression breaks, wounded and more than a little surprised. Liam steps back from the doorway, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his peacoat.

“Liam,” the pathologist starts, voice dangerously high over the syllables, “can we talk about—”

“Enjoy the rest of your night,” Liam says, only a little raw, steps quick back down the hall.

He fights the miserable twist of his mouth as he winds the car through London’s frozen streets to his flat. To the boy curled on his sofa, book dangling precariously in his fingers while he dozes off.

To all the questions that Tomlinson has done nothing to quell.

Zayn stirs as Liam is hanging his coat by the door, fingers twitching and the novel in his grasp dropping to the floor. Loki, curled by Zayn’s feet at the end of the couch, startles a bit but doesn’t move.

The boy props himself up against the armrest, rubbing at his eyes with knuckles covered by a dark waffle-knit shirt Liam last saw buried in the back of his own dresser. 

“We waited up for you,” Zayn murmurs with his eyes half open. There’s a sleep-roughness to his voice that’s terribly endearing, high and crackly, candied.

It makes something in Liam break apart and melt.

“Didn’t have to,” he says softly, pulling off his shoes before leaning over the back of the couch to kiss Zayn’s sleep-dry lips.

“Know that,” Zayn says into Liam’s mouth, and it’s probably meant to be derisive, but it comes out so painfully sweet that Liam gets lightheaded.

“Bed?” he asks. It’s far too easy to swallow his questions, his fears. Zayn is warm and soft-eyed and looking up at him with such hazy, perfect fondness that Liam wants to crumble into it, fall to ruin.

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles, freeing his toes from beneath Loki and standing, stretching long and lazy like a cat. “What did Louis say?”

Liam flinches, nearly imperceptible.

And Zayn catches it, easy as anything. “Oh,” he says flatly. “So he and Harry aren’t up for sushi on Saturday, then.”

“Harry might be,” Liam offers weakly.

With a light snort, Zayn pads around the sofa to stand behind Liam and snake his arms around his waist, face buried in the muscle of his back. “He won’t be.”

“He won’t be,” Liam agrees. He slides his hands over Zayn’s, laces their fingers while Zayn is too sleepy to protest. “This is one of the worst parts about being an adult.”

“Havin’ a row with your pathologist mate?” Zayn asks while Liam awkwardly shuffles them through the flat to the bedroom. Loki’s feet pad on the carpet behind them.

The word _colleague_ sits uncomfortably on Liam’s tongue like a taste he can’t spit out. “Yeah,” he says uneasily. “I mean—but it’s more than that. We’re not. We’re not mates, now. He’s just a coworker that I’ve realized I don’t like very much.”

“Did you proper break up with him, then?” They undress in the dark with only the light from the hall filtering into Liam’s bedroom, larger than Zayn’s but less efficiently budgeted for floor space. Zayn pulls his trousers off and then collapses backward onto the bed, thighs parted slightly while he watches Liam finish undressing.

Liam joins him a moment later, falling off to Zayn’s side only to hoist himself up so he can hover over the boy and kiss him, then again a little deeper. “Basically,” he admits.

“Was it because of me?”

It shouldn’t startle Liam, a point-blank question from an intelligent person, and it doesn’t really, but he’s nevertheless unsure of how to answer.

He can’t very well tell Zayn the truth: Tomlinson considers him a suspect, has apparently enough reason for suspicion to cling to it even in the face of Liam’s anger and dismissal.

Zayn will know if he lies, though. He has a knack for reading people—reading _Liam_ —that goes unparalleled.

“He doesn’t think…” Liam starts, tracing by feel the X stitched just below the collar of Zayn’s borrowed shirt, “…that we’re particularly…good, together.”

There’s a question implicit there, an unvoiced _Do you think we’re good together?_ Liam realizes it the second it’s out. Winces at the neediness of it.

Whatever warm, sleepy spell has Zayn curling up in Liam’s clothes and waiting for him before going to bed still seems to hold its magic, though. Zayn brings the hand Liam has on his shirt’s stitching up to his mouth and kisses it, lips soft just below his knuckles.

“Louis doesn’t know shit about how good we are together,” Zayn says, certainty intoxicating.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The boy repeats his procedure, watching the towels under his slim fingers turn red. “You don’t want me to tell you about it.”_   
> 
> 
> _“I might,” Liam challenges. He toes a bit closer to him, hovers over Zayn where he’s down on his haunches._  
> 
> 
> _“You don’t,” Zayn says, level._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovelies! I dunno what's up with me this week, I've been posting like a bat outta hell. I think it's the comments? Chatting with you beautiful wonderful souls about this story is honestly such an amazing treat, oh man. It really does make my days so much brighter. Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me that opportunity, you're such fantastic people.  
> 
> 
> Lots of love to Monica for helping me out with this chapter, AGAIN, and lots and lots of love to all of you. <3  
> 
> 
> Finally and more seriously: **This chapter has a discomfort warning for VIOLENCE RELATED TO ANIMALS.** It's nothing intensely graphic, but I know that's a really really hard one for a lot of people (including me), so I'm letting you know in case that affects your ability to enjoy the story. **At the end of the chapter I've placed a note letting you know how that particular scene works out** so that, if so inclined, you're able to know and (hopefully) enjoy the chapter anyway. I hope that helps.  
> 
> 
> Alrighty. Here we go.

One year.

It’s a reprimand, a siren’s wail. A puncture wound. Liam stares down at the long, laminate table, noise buzzing all around him.

One year ago today, the body of Eli Stokes had appeared, clean cuts and heart wrapped in twine and so close to the Yard it had been nearly an invitation. _Come and play with me._

That first time, the pristine, searing white of the note against the dark tile of the shopping center had pulled Liam in immediately, eyes keen and unprepared.

_For Detective Inspector Payne, a man amongst beasts._

Reading the words had stolen his breath, narrowed his vision. His lungs tighten now just remembering.

On that first day with that first body, Niall had noticed the shake in Liam’s hands first, the pallid sheen to his face. Liam was pulled off the scene for all of an hour before Winston called and told him to stay, see if he noticed something the others wouldn’t.

“The killer wants to play ball with _you,_ ” Winston noted, voice buzzing a bit with the poor mobile connection, “so _use_ that.”

And the detective had been so eager to prove he could be of use.

Every lead disintegrated though, poured like sand through his fingers, like ash. The only information he and the team ever gleaned was from the bodies they couldn’t keep from turning up. The only guesses they ever made were met with resistance so uniform it seemed almost fated that this would become a case left unsolved. A massive black mark on the ledger of the city, and the Yard, and Detective Inspector Liam Payne.

He sits at the long table and traces idle shapes with his nail to hear the small noise, feel the cool glide. He tries to keep his chin up enough that the cameras flashing won’t get a shot they can pair with some scathing headline about the investigation’s failure.

They will anyway, all the trash rags he can’t believe ever make it into the press room.

And they won’t be wrong.

Winston starts off the conference by leaning slightly too close to the mic’s foam insulation and leaking pretty words about progress and a safer tomorrow, the skill of the team, their total dedication to the cause.

It’s a lovely little piece of propaganda, showcases beautifully how Winston got to where he is so young.

And how well he can conceal his irritation. Winston wanted to postpone this conference until they’d verified Hueffed’s lack of alibi at the time of all ten murders. He’d wanted to come to the floor amidst applause, killer dead by his own hands, victims’ families vindicated.

The wheels were already in motion, though, press and public too eager for the drama of what some saw as a horrifying reality but what most, Liam knew, saw as a bit of dinner gossip, sensational and outlandish like a German fairytale.

Zayn’s put a ban on the ten o’clock news in what Liam suspects is a preventative measure for their collective mental health.

Winston leans back from his mic and opens the floor up to questions for the actual team, throwing them to the wolves.

It’s Liam, naturally, and then Horan and Kloss, the most experienced members of his team. They’re up here because they can handle it. Tomlinson is on another case, cooped up in his office and firmly not Liam’s problem. Delevingne and Cabello are off finishing up the confirmation of things like class absences and unmet appointments on the part of Sam Hueffed for the dates and times of the murders. Sealing his infamy.

The people in this room don’t know that, have not the barest inkling of who the bloke Liam found dangling from a kitchen doorway is yet. No idea that the person terrorizing the city in such an exact way was likely laying dead on cold metal mere days ago not six floors beneath their feet.

The whole point is to protect the peace, after all.

“Do you think the killer will strike again on the anniversary of their debut?” asks a woman in a loud jacket.

Kloss starts in before Liam can. “We don’t wish to sensationalize this case,” she begins, smooth and with the barest hint of reprimand, “and, as there is currently nothing in our investigation that has led us to believe the culprit is ritualistic, we have no reason to expect that.”

“You say they’re not ritualistic,” comes another woman’s crisp tenor from the back of the room, “but it’s true that the bodies are found mutilated in a specific way, correct?”

Liam’s poised to answer, mouth open, but Horan is already talking. “It’s correct that the bodies are, shall we say, _presented_ to us by the killer in a particular way.” The blond’s breath stutters for a fraction of a second that Liam wouldn’t notice is he weren’t seated next to him. The man shakes his head once, dispelling the gruesome memories. “And, truly, it is something fiendish. But when my colleague says _ritualistic,_ it’s meant in the sense of timing. There is no traceable pattern of when the killer chooses to strike.”

A few notes are scribbled down or muttered into recording devices. Not mentioning the notes is very, very intentional; given the subject and the way the story already lends itself to yellow journalism, to fear-mongering tabloid fodder, the Yard thought it best to withhold that piece of the investigation. Possibly indefinitely.

“Detective Inspector Payne, as lead of this investigation, _do you_ feel that you’re any closer to finding the killer than you were a year ago?”

He saw it coming; it hits Liam in the gut anyway. He blink slowly while he considers his answer. Looks out the windows to the brittle grays of London in early winter.

So much like the year before.

“I think it would be fair to say the investigation has made _tremendous_ progress,” Liam answers, clinical and calm. “We have an ever-growing evidence bank that paints a clearer and clearer picture each day.” Albeit a picture burnt at the edges, vital bits torn off and confusing patterns leading nowhere making up its bulk. “I have the best homicide team in the country working with me, and superior officers within that team whose focus, day in and day out, remains on this investigation.” And occasionally one boy genius, but only three people in this room know that, know how intertwined Zayn has become in the hunt for London’s latest serial killer. Liam doesn’t fancy cluing anyone else in. “The thing to know is that we’ve begun to back the culprit into a corner. There’s at least one incredibly strong lead. They’re not as clever as they’d like to think, and we get closer to ending this nightmare for the people of London every day and every hour.”

It’s a good line. The room ripples with hastily-scribbled quotes and cameramen checking their viewfinders to make sure the lead Detective Inspector remains in focus. Winston shoots Liam a small, approving look that makes the man a bit queasy.

The conference goes quickly after that. Liam doesn’t end up having to answer questions that aren’t directed at him, Kloss and Horan holding the room exceptionally well. Liam remembers being younger, sitting at this table as a subordinate of whoever was running his current investigation. He remembers the way officers too often fell apart when asked to play delicate politics with the press, how he’d find himself handling the brunt of questions more and more. The way it had earned him a reputation as a sergeant you wanted on your case, at first as a mouthpiece but, ultimately, as a fiercely dogged and perceptive detective. How much of his career has been earnest work and how much is simply knowing how to play the game.

Maybe he and Winston aren’t terribly different.

“Another for DI Payne,” a pretty woman with long hair the color of pumpkin bread says. Liam looks up to meet her eyes, suss out her intent as separate from her words. It’s a good skill, in rooms like this. She seems honestly guileless, though, when she continues. “Already Detective Inspector Horan has informed us that there’s no way to know for sure the gender of the killer, beyond balance of probability skewing male.”

“Correct,” Liam says.

“So then, what _can_ you tell us about the killer?” the woman asks. “As far as possible physical or personal description, what have you gleaned in the last 365 days about the person terrorizing our streets in such a unique and grisly way?” She bites her lip as she stares at Liam, likely wondering if she stuck the landing or went overboard in her delivery. Liam wonders idly what publication she said she was from, who has her here.

He leans into the mic slightly to answer. “While we have no indication of our culprit’s gender,” he says, “we can say with some certainty that they’ve a flare for the dramatic.” A dark, nervous little titter goes around the room. “They value symbolism and presentation, they are exceedingly neat, they thrive on attention—”

Liam’s voice dies, cuts out like an exhaust pipe stopping up.

There’s a tense, horrible second where everyone in the room is looking at the detective and he has no idea how to finish his thought.

Except he does,doesn’t he.

Liam clears his throat twice, throwing a humble, twinkling smile at the reporter and murmuring a soft _sorry about that_ into his mic before speaking at normal volume.

“We’re looking for someone intelligent, egotistical, and frankly deranged,” he finishes, tone so level he impresses himself, “and we’re getting closer.”

They shuffle off the platform the table rests on minutes later, after Kloss fields a question on the ‘very strong lead’ that is only a couple elegant phrases away from her simply saying _fuck off_. Staying back as the crush of reporters flock to their offices to type out reimagining’s of the press conference, Liam feels Horan put a hand lightly on his arm.

“Alright?” Horan murmurs near his ear, shrewd eyes radiating concern.

Trust Niall to notice Liam playing off his hiccup earlier. “Yeah, y’know, my throat’s been bugging me all day,” Liam says, grimacing a little and petting at his throat. “Gonna grab some lozenges from the front before I come back to the office.”

“Excuse me?”

Liam looks away from where Niall eyes him doubtfully to the woman in front of him, the same ginger who’d asked the profiling question.

“Hello,” he says easily.

The woman smiles, light smattering of freckles prominent on the winter paleness of her skin. “This may be a bit forward, but I thought I might as well take the opportunity.”

She holds out a business card that Liam takes slowly, dubiously.

“If you ever want to do a follow-up on whatever tidbit you were holding back up there,” the woman explains. Liam feels confusion wash through him, until—

“Or if you want to grab lunch,” she tacks on, smile curving up on one side. “Whichever.”

Niall is a gentleman, so he waits until the woman has melted into the crowd to laugh and let out a low whistle. “Wrong tree,” he says ruefully. “Damn, Payno.”

“Did that woman just chat me up at a press conference for a serial murder investigation,” Liam asks, pitchy on the end.

“Should’ve warned ya,” Niall laments with a tremble of laughter and a clap to Liam’s back. “You gave her that smile and she was _fixated._ ”

“What smile,” Liam asks absently, pushing the card down into the bottom of his trouser pocket to deal with later.

Niall chuckles to himself, shaking his head as they make their way out the door of the conference room, Cabello and Delevingne just ahead of them.

A thought occurs. Liam’s lips twitch up as he thinks about it. “I need to toss her card before Zayn sticks his hand in my pocket and loses his fucking mind.”

It’s an entertaining thought, the cold, nearly biblical strop Zayn would settle into at the expense of Liam and anything breakable he owns. The way he’d dig his nails into Liam’s back when they ended up fucking against the wall, too worked up from driving each other perfectly, punishingly mad all night to refrain. The way he’d bite at the spot on Liam’s throat he favors until a bruise the color of wine appeared, lave it over with his tongue and chant _mine_ to a ragged refrain of _yes._

The boy can be brutal, Liam thinks. He can be.

His expression falls a bit. The image immolates, burns so brightly Liam can’t bear to look at it straight on. A few cameras linger in the halls. Liam catches the echoes of polished words from reporters filming the end segments of stories on the murderer hunting London, the psychopath whose unpredictability is matched only by their vicious zeal.

Liam thinks, rather darkly, that he would characterize it as more of a _panache._ Mostly he tries to drown the news teams out, dissuade himself from turning around and informing the man with the large teeth and slicked-back hair nearly as oily as his voice that he should lend some of his perfect clarity on the situation to the team investigating it.

The detective hadn’t answered honestly, earlier. Had lied by omission, which, given his line of work, is often more dire than simple deception.

When asked what the Met had learned of the killer in the last year, the easy answer—lifted more or less directly from the profiling report—had rolled off Liam’s tongue with all the forethought of a papercut.

The terrible addendum remained buried behind his molars: their killer knew far, far more about Liam than Liam knew about them.

He does, actually, end up swinging by the front desk to ask the staff for cough drops. The lad manning the desk hands him a quick handful of waxy-papered lozenges and wishes him a good rest of the day, eyes already back on the game device he’s got tucked in his lap.

Liam snorts, popping a lozenge into his mouth as he turns.

He nearly chokes on it when he smacks into Tomlinson.

The pathologist lets out a little huffed _fuck_ before reaching a hand out to steady the person threatening to topple onto him. The hand drops when he takes in who it is. “Oh.”

This is generally where Liam would make a joke about sexual harassment, maybe wiggle his eyebrows and start hounding the man for details on what Harry was doing at his flat the other night.

Whatever wellspring their easy solidarity and companionship drew from—the closest thing Liam’s ever felt to brotherhood, he admits within the safety of his own head—isn’t there now. It’s more like running into an ex, the hot flush of panic, the darting eyes that refuse to meet.

Neither says anything as they create space between themselves, try not to let how badly it’s shaken them through to the surface.

“Watch where you’re going,” Tomlinson mutters, and it’s so _Louis_ of him, petulant and intent on the last word, that Liam feels a sting of treacherous affection under the bruise of his betrayal.

He’s so caught up in the throbbing hurt of it that he almost doesn’t notice Louis has his coat on, is sweeping toward the front door.

It’s not worth it to ask where he’s going, to call over the low din of the lobby only to be met with silence, but it’s early enough in the day that Liam is nevertheless curious, unused to having to wonder about Tomlinson at all.

He lets it rest like a stiff tag on a shirt. It’s definitely the least of his concerns.

When he makes it back up to the office, Horan beckons with a call of his name. His eyes are grave, a little grayer than in natural light.

Liam feels the anticipation sitting under his skin harden to something vitreous and brittle. “Ni,” he answers.

There’s Horan’s hand on his arm again, this time a steady, anchoring weight, like the man knows he’ll need it.

Liam is detritus in a tide. He breathes through his lips, holding his gaze.

The man huffs out his own bracing exhale before speaking. “We got the info back on Hueffed’s whereabouts during the homicides,” he tells Liam slowly. “He—he has an alibi for nearly all of them, Li. Security footage for one.” There’s a twitch at his mouth, annoyance and defeat. “He’s not our guy.”

He’s not. Of course he’s not.

Liam tries to breathe. “That’s—” he manages, but it’s all he can manage, panic and a sensation far too close to despair flooding his system.

Niall’s expression breaks, something sympathetic. His hand is still on Liam’s arm, fingers squeezing once before he lets go. “We’re gonna catch the fucker.”

“Yeah,” the detective echoes gamely. His voice reverberates in his own ears, closed-circuit.

It goes like that, hours under the same wave of static, nothing quite breaching the feeling of failure. The insistent _what the fuck happens now._

Because Sam Hueffed had made complete sense. His elimination as a suspect sets them back—which seems to be their specialty, Liam thinks bitterly—and leaves them with no promising leads. Nothing to go on.

He spares a moment to be cynically grateful that the press conference was held before word reached their office regarding Hueffed. He could have faked it, he thinks, laid out bland, easy lies, but the machine of the media is deceptive enough without the detective’s contribution.

Beyond that, he’s not convinced he could obscure the building dread leaking out of his pores like black light. It silently keeps his colleagues at bay all day, fish parting in the wake of a storm-eyed shark. 

Samuel Hueffed wasn’t the killer. Too neat a conclusion, too simple a solution. Silently, Liam admits he suspected as much. More than the stubborn sense of pride that makes him certain he’d have been the first to know—would have realized the second he stepped into that reeking flat—there’s something that’s long settled at the base of his neck. Subtle as the caress of lips, some days. Sharp as a press of teeth, others.

An image jolted Liam from sleep the other night. Stark, even in the haze of dreaming, and blisteringly cold as it pressed against his consciousness. Numbed his fingertips where they curled on the mattress.

A note, stiff and austere white, heavy the way they always are when he lifts them from rigid fingers.

And a name.

He’d awoken clammy and breathless, lurching a bit with the impact of it.

Then a small, lost noise sounded through the darkness, something insulated and close. The warmth beside him shifted, slim ankles tangling around his calves.

Liam had been keenly aware of the elevation of pulse when he wrapped an arm around Zayn and gently pulled the boy back into his chest, breathing him in. Letting the familiarity lull him back toward sleep with the anxious lullaby: _it’s nothing, it’s nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing._

He’s still thinking about the shift of Zayn’s skin and bones under his hands, about elusive sleep, when his mobile starts ringing.

Through unfocused eyes, he watches himself swipe the green button, bringing the phone to his ear mechanically. “’lo?” he answers, voice rough.

“Babe,” he hears.

His free hand twitches on his desk, unease creeping through him. Zayn doesn’t go in for endearments often at all. He certainly doesn’t let them fall off his tongue like they don’t belong there, clunky and odd.

“What’s wrong?” Liam demands. There are little noises in the background that remind Liam of the station’s lobby, clinical with an underlying note of urgency. “Where are you?” he tacks on. A quick glance at the clock reveals it’s a little after three. He frowns. It’s Thursday, so Zayn should be at lecture still, not—

“I’m at a vet clinic,” Zayn tells him, voice still odd, “Loki’s—hurt.”

Liam’s stomach plunges. Through a rapidly constricting throat, he manages, “ _How?_ What—?”

“Something slashed him.” It’s nearly inflectionless, though out of shock or to mask it Liam can’t tell. “He—I went to feed him like you asked, and he was laying by the door bleeding. So I—”

“Is he okay?” Liam strains, hoarse. His treacherous mind conjures the image, his sweet puppy breathing shallowly as his blood seeps. “Is my dog gonna be okay?”

“They’ve got him in surgery now.” A beat of silence, like Zayn isn’t even breathing. “I called you as soon as I sat down.”

There’s a wickedly persistent desire to panic. Liam shoves it down, back past his windpipe, into his stomach where it turns to acid. “Thank—thank you. Text me the address, I’m headed to you now.”

“Okay,” Zayn says. “Liam, could you—”

“Yeah?” Liam struggles into his peacoat, mobile still pressed to his ear.

“Bring me a shirt?” Zayn asks, voice giving the barest waver. “This one’s covered in blood.”

Vision dark at the edges, Liam nods before he remembers to speak. “Yeah. Yeah. Be there soon, okay?”

“’Kay,” Zayn mumbles. Liam doesn’t bother to say goodbye before ending the call.

Delevingne is shooting him a stricken look as he flies past her out the office door, so Liam assumes with a sickening heaviness that she overheard, understands. He’ll text one of the team later, make sure they know where he’s run off to.

It can wait.

He’s nearly sick when he bursts through his flat door and sees a patch of the carpet stained red, smells the metallic cloy of it.

That has to wait, too. Loki—sweet and small and _hurt,_ so fucking hurt _—_ is laying on a cold metal table somewhere, bright eyes dimmed over with anesthesia and confusion, little ears pulled back in fear when he can’t find Liam or hear his voice.

If he’s even still alive.

Bile lurches up Liam’s throat. He grabs a shirt from his dresser and a bottle of water he left on the counter that morning, the veterinary insurance info he keeps in a file in the pantry. Then he’s out the door, racing to the address Zayn sent him.

It’s not their usual clinic, the one Liam brings Loki to for checkups and vaccinations, but it’s clean and the woman behind the counter smiles when she sees him.

Before she takes in his expression. “May I help you?” she asks tentatively. Liam wonders how wild his eyes look, how white his knuckles.

“Li,” a voice calls across the lobby. “Liam.”

“Zayn,” Liam breathes, whipping his head around to take the boy in.

He’s—he’s _drenched,_ soft grey shirt splattered in drying burgundy on the front, stiff and tacky with it. There’s smears of it on his collarbones, the underside of his jaw, his fingers. It’s fainter in some places like he tried to wipe it off.

Liam knows: it’s not that easy.

Zayn sees his distress—might be able to taste it, with how potent it is, how closely it resembles the tang of blood—and stumbles up on his coltish legs, motioning Liam to the bathroom. There’s one other group in the lobby, a woman and a girl, and they watch with grave eyes as Liam holds the door of the men’s room open for Zayn so that he won’t have to touch the handle with his bloodied hands.

“Why is there so much,” Liam asks helplessly once the door closes. In this starker light, the blood is maroon on the shirt Zayn peels over his head. There are smudges of it staining his skin amidst the tattoos, dreadful little whorls of menacing color where it doesn’t belong.

Zayn casts him a level look from the corner of his eye while he examines himself in the mirror, wetting a paper towel and starting at his chin. Droplets of rust start running down his chest. Liam has the keenest déjà vu.

Quietly, the boy says, “I tried to compress it while I got the cab.”

It’s a cruel image and Liam’s eyelids flicker as he sees it behind them: Zayn propping the dog up on the frigid hood of someone’s car, maybe, pressing a cloth into Loki’s prone, whimpering form. Zayn, hands already sticky with blood, waving down any cab willing to stop. Zayn clutching the pup to his chest and demanding the driver take them to the nearest clinic. Stumbling inside, passing the animal off to the attendant and running a hand through his hair distractedly before remembering his fingers, his entire torso, is drenched in blood. Zayn, rattling off the few jumbled details at his disposal in clipped medical jargon to the woman at the front. Zayn, making himself as compact as possible in a waiting room chair, keeping the time until Liam could get to him by the rate at which his shirt began to stick to his skin.

“Thank you,” Liam murmurs. He’d said it on the phone, perfunctory and fast, but here among the sterile tiling of the men’s washroom he hears it echo faintly back, fully realized gratitude leaving him nearly gasping.

Zayn shrugs, collarbones prominent with the motion. “It was the thing to do.”

Liam watches the boy wipe the smears of blood from his chest and wrists, wash his hands until the water runs clear. “Not everyone would have done it,” he says softly. “Not everyone could have.”

“Just luck.” Zayn flicks excess water from his hands, turns to take the shirt Liam holds out to him. “Just timing.”

The breath out that Liam takes stumbles past his lips, uneven and shaky. “Do you think—”

“I don’t know,” Zayn interrupts smoothly. He slips into the shirt, dark and worn. “They’ll tell us soon.”

Liam bites at the inside of his mouth miserably. When Zayn’s dressed and no longer covered in Loki’s blood, they sit back down in the lobby. Zayn doesn’t object when Liam leans into him and puts his head on his shoulder, armrest between them digging into his side unpleasantly.

The receptionist comes over and gives Liam a softly pitying look she’d likely rehearsed before her job interview, asking him to finish filling out the form Zayn had started.

Liam grips the plastic clipboard and realizes it’s mostly completed. Address and number, full name of owner and pet, standard vaccination history, current medications. All that’s left is a blank space for his signature.

“Why didn’t you sign it,” Liam asks quietly, looking it over again. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

“Wanted to make sure all the info was correct,” Zayn mumbles. Liam’s still fixated on the scrawl covering the page, each detail laid out neatly as if Loki were Zayn’s own.

“You know it is,” Liam says, a little wonderingly. Then, brow furrowing slightly, “How, though?”

Zayn turns his head to face him, Liam echoing the motion. The boy licks over his lip, blinking once before opening his mouth to explain.

Then a weird thing happens. His mouth slides closed, expression blanking so quickly Liam is briefly worried he’s hurt, too. His eyes remain focused on Liam but hold a blindness, posture rigid.

There’s a muted click of shoes approaching them. Liam’s stomach clenches as he looks up, expecting a member of the staff to be hovering over them with tight eyes and a grim announcement, or else a tired, reassuring smile.

It’s neither. The woman clearly doesn’t work here, sharp moto jacket and immaculately styled hair, teeth gleaming white against her dark skin when she smiles at them like they’re all familiar.

She’s not familiar to Liam, not in the slightest. He glances back at Zayn, sees the boy’s eyes resolutely not taking in the woman before them.

“Zayn,” she prompts. It’s soft, nearly coaxing. Liam sees Zayn’s jaw flex once before he drags his gaze up to her face.

Her eyes flicker back and forth across his features, searching. “Can we talk for a moment, darling?” she asks quietly.

Liam feels something press uncomfortably into his diaphragm. _Darling._

This is the part where Zayn laughs her off, burning and mean, or else gives the woman a look so cold she scuttles away. This is the part where that terrifying twist of Zayn’s features makes itself known. This is the part where some chilling undercurrent in his soul rises briefly, disastrously to the surface.

Zayn’s chair grates against the floor as he stands, a staccato scrape against tile. Without so much as a glance at Liam’s furrowed brow, he follows the woman to the opposite side of the room.

Mystified, Liam watches the woman gesticulate with two fingers tapping the side of her face, Zayn echoing the motion and rubbing at his own jaw while their voices come out too quietly for him to catch.

There’s something, Liam thinks, to the way the woman has her head inclined. _Maternal,_ he decides, watching her cock her hip in a way that reads as no-nonsense. In fitting contrast, Zayn looks twitchy and decidedly teenaged, arms wrapped around his front, expression stormy and impatient.

She asks something, Liam barely catching the quiet upward inflection from across the room. It’s easy to read Zayn’s response, though, insult and shock in the twist of his lips and narrowed eyes, head shaking back and forth before he hisses a response.

The detective can practically see the boy’s hackles rising. This day has already been extraordinarily shitty, possibly one of the worst of Liam’s life, and all he wants to do is _sleep._ That doesn’t mean he’s not on the verge of striding over to the pair and extricating Zayn from the conversation with a hand on his waist and a few pointed words to this woman Zayn apparently knows well enough to roll his eyes at while nodding along to her lecture.

He’s about to leverage himself up when a woman in green scrubs steps through the door to the back, small pink kennel in her arms.

“Caroline?” she calls into the waiting room. Liam’s watches Zayn’s companion look up, smiling when she sees the kennel. She touches Zayn’s arm once before clicking over, cooing at the animal in the carrier and asking the attendant questions.

Blood feeling a bit frozen, Liam nearly misses Zayn slumping back into the chair by his side.

“Sorry about that,” the boy says tetchily. He scratches at his nose, dark expression burning lowly.

_Caroline._ Liam thinks back several frozen weeks to the note inside Zayn’s rucksack, the foggy confusion muddled by sleepiness and the rattling apprehension that the mere suggestion of Zayn’s pill bottles brought on.

_Emergencies,_ it had read, handwriting unmistakable.

“You’re fine.” Liam lets himself believe he’s answering Zayn and not something internal. He brings an arm around the back of the boy’s chair just to have something to cling to.

A thousand sluggish heartbeats later, after Liam’s all but memorized the chart depicting a Great Dane’s skeleton on the far wall, the same attendant comes back through the door to the surgery. “Liam?” she calls, eyes flitting until they land on the two remaining people in the room.

The detective nods tiredly, muscles stiff as he stands. Zayn stands too, a bit more fluid, and they wait side by side while she approaches.

Her eyes seem clear of misery. That could just be professionalism. That could just be the product of a thousand awful fucking deaths announced in this very room. Liam keeps his hope stoked low, doesn’t build it up until he can know for sure.

The woman smiles, though, worn and thin but true. “Loki is stable,” she tells them, words warm blue and seeping relief into Liam’s system. “He’s going to need to stay with us for the night before we give him an all-clear, but he did beautifully despite the trauma.” Her smile sweetens. “He’s a brave little pup.”

Of course he is. He’s the _bravest_ pup, the best boy. Liam inhales a full breath for the first time since this morning.

“Thank you,” he whispers, smile blooming at the corners of his mouth. “That’s—I think I might collapse from how relieved I am to hear that, actually.”

A small laugh from the woman. “If you’d like to speak to our surgeon, she’s available.”

Liam agrees, thanking the woman again before she shuffles back into the heart of the clinic.

“Fuck,” he exhales, voice rough near the end. “Oh my God.”

The detective turns and wraps his arms around Zayn’s waist, pulling them together as he buries his face in the boy’s neck. Zayn strokes his hair lightly, other hand sandwiched between them over Liam’s pec and centimeters above his heart. Liam feels that hand move, too, minute stroking motions meant to soothe.

“See, no reason to be upset,” Zayn mumbles into his hair. “Got all worked up over nothing.”

Liam shakes his head against the juncture of neck and shoulder. “Worked up. Bit of an understatement,” he whispers, kissing the skin dampened by his breath.

Through silent agreement, they don’t pull away from each other until the surgeon strides in. Zayn keeps his pinky wrapped around Liam’s as they listen to the woman explain the dissolving sutures and how long they’ll take to disappear. The operation and recovery process.

Just how close it was.

“The compression was likely why he was able to make it all the way over here, the poor dear,” she says, mouth a sympathetic twist.

Liam tightens his pinky around Zayn’s infinitesimally. “How big was it?”

“The laceration?” the surgeon clarifies. “About eleven centimeters. Not terribly deep.”

Such a sterile fact shouldn’t make a man who investigates murder for a living flinch. And yet.

“Luckily,” the surgeon continues, used to that reaction or simply oblivious, “it was a fairly clean cut, so there won’t be much scarring, internal or otherwise.”

Feeling suddenly spent, Liam nods and thanks the vet mechanically. They both shake her hand and let her depart to prepare her surgery for whatever luckless creature next finds its way under her blade.

“You ready to go home?” Zayn asks softly. He seems tired, too. Liam remembers suddenly the shirt destroyed by blood, the hunted look in Zayn’s eyes when Liam had rushed in.

Words fill his throat, warm and volatile. He swallows them down and nods, moving to grasp Zayn’s hand fully. They stop by the front desk for info on when they can pick Loki up the next day and climb into the car, exhaustion plain in their silence back to Liam’s flat.

The detective remembers as they climb the stairs what awaits them. His steps falter for a second before they pick back up. Loki is fine. Loki is healing, probably drugged out of his little doggie mind on some excellent painkillers.

It’s nothing strange or especially horrific at all. It’s just blood.

Zayn catches the hesitation—has no choice but to catch it when he runs into Liam where he’s stilled at the edge of the landing—and prods at Liam’s hip until he starts forward again, batting Zayn’s finger away behind his back.

It’s automatic for the detective to breathe through his mouth as he flicks on the light. Magnetic and grisly, the stain of blood draws his eyes.

Knowing that Loki’s going to be okay, it doesn’t look like nearly as much, the ghastly puddle Liam could swear he saw.

It’s still a lot.

“Can’t believe he—” Liam begins.

_Survived that,_ he means to finish, only.

“What?” Zayn grumbles, once again running into Liam where he’s frozen.

Liam’s eyes fly from the drying blood to the carpet all around it. The baseboards. The air vent.

“Wh—” he begins again. Stops again. Swallows past an impossibly dry mouth. “D’you know where I keep the peroxide?” he asks slowly.

“Under the sink in the loo?”

“There you go,” Liam mumbles distractedly. He goes to run a hand over Zayn’s waist as the boy shuffles by him but stops, unwilling to reveal the tremor in his fingers.

Zayn catches at least part of the aborted motion, shooting him a quizzical look as he slips down the hall.

Liam waits until his svelte frame disappears into the loo to wheel around, frantic and discerning while he combs the carpeting with his eyes.

Earlier, panic a fever overriding nearly everything in Liam’s brain, he’d failed to do much more than grab what he needed and leave. Had processed the blood on the carpet only insofar as it made him want to vomit or pass out or scream at the perfect unfairness of a creature as innocent as Loki being wounded.

The panic’s abated though, and Liam’s life is, after all, observation. He sees now what he didn’t then.

One puddle of blood. One. No spots, or drips, or pitiful smears where Loki may have crawled his way from wherever he’d managed to slice himself so horrifically.

Which—where was that, exactly? No trail of blood meant no clear indication of path, but it couldn’t be far. Liam casts about for a jagged object, a wayward nail jutting out of a corner or a piece of glass he’d somehow broken and failed to clean up.

Zayn shuffles back out, brown bottle in one hand and a wad of kitchen towels in the other. Liam is unmoving as he watches Zayn sink to his knees and pour a measure of the liquid onto the stain, spreading it out and giving it a few seconds before pushing a couple squares of dense paper into it. They bloom red at the center.

He doesn’t seem particularly bothered.

“Could you tell what he cut himself on?” Liam asks, voice low under the hammering of his pulse.

Zayn doesn’t look up when he answers, “Would’ve told you if I did.”

“And he was just—laying there,” Liam confirms. “Poor little fellow.”

The boy repeats his procedure, pouring and blotting and watching the towels under his slim fingers turn red. “You don’t want me to tell you about it.”

“I might,” Liam challenges. He toes a bit closer to him, hovers over Zayn where he’s down on his haunches.

“You don’t,” Zayn says, level. He finally looks up, eyes nearing green in this lighting.

“I really think I do,” Liam says, and there’s an edge to it. “That’s my dog, Zayn, I want to know what happened.”

There’s a silent moment where Zayn’s mouth thins and his eyes narrow. “I swung by to feed him since you had your conference,” he says, voice grating over his annoyance. “When I opened the door, I called for him and heard whimpering.”

Liam fights the urge to cringe and remains silent, holding Zayn’s gaze.

The boy continues. “So I looked down, and he was laying here.” He pats the damp, pinked kitchen towels with the pads of two fingers. “Didn’t fancy watching him bleed out in front of me, so I compressed it and wrapped him up in a towel and got him to the vet.” He adds the sopping paper towels to his growing pile. This time, he pours peroxide straight onto a fresh one, blotting at where the stain has receded significantly.

Trust Zayn to be in his element here.

“What do you think it was?” Liam asks, tone nearly mild except for the palpable hardness to it.

Zayn swallows, shoulders hunched and eyes on the floor. “I didn’t exactly check—”

“I’m not asking what you _thought_ it was,” Liam says, and even he can admit his tone is verging on nasty, “I’m asking what you _think_ it was.”

“I don’t know.” There’s finality to the words.

Liam refuses to honor it. “Was the door locked? When you got here.”

Zayn pauses in blotting at what remains of Loki’s blood. “Don’t do this thing you’re doing.”

Pulse thundering, Liam takes a step back so that he won’t give in to the urge to nudge at the center of Zayn’s chest with his foot, pin him to the ground until the shit he’s saying starts making sense. “Answer the question,” he bites out.

One of those haughty, irritated, _infuriating_ glances. “Yes.”

It’s maybe the truth. The boy doesn’t look like he’s lying, posture loose, eyes clear.

That doesn’t mean fuck all, though. Not with him. “Yes, the door was locked?” Liam presses.

“ _Yeah._ ” Zayn only flicks his glance down long enough to soak his final clean towel in peroxide and press it to the floor, palms flat. Then he’s back to staring up at Liam through thick lashes and who the hell knows how many deceptions. “You never leave it unlocked. Neither do I.”

“That’s fair,” Liam says slowly, like he’s considering it. It’s the truth, as far as he knows; he and Zayn are the only two with keys to his flat. Zayn’s copy didn’t even exist a month ago. He’s never found the door unlocked after Zayn has gone to take care of Loki while Liam is dealing with an investigation or a meeting or a prodigiously long queue at Tesco’s.

He’s also never found his dog half-dead, though.

“What do _you_ think it was?” Zayn asks.

It—it might be a diversion, but the boy is standing and walking back into the loo to tuck the nearly-drained bottle of peroxide away, a quick glance over his shoulder like he’s not bothered either way by Liam’s response.

“Not sure,” the detective answers. “We’re gonna wear shoes when we’re in the entryway, though. Just in case.”

Zayn reemerges. “Sensible,” he congratulates, and it’s stiff, but it’s a hell of a lot nicer than Liam’s been.

The man breathes in through his mouth. “Who was that woman at the clinic?”

There’s a moment between them. It holds the type of silence that crescendos.

“My secret lover,” Zayn offers glibly, eyes wide, like he’s struggling to understand the punchline of a particularly convoluted joke. “I was putting you off the scent with the whole barebacking and monogamy thing, but as I’ve been found out I think it’s only fair you know: her cat is my illegitimate son.”

Liam chews at the inside of his lip. “You’re not going to tell me.”

“No,” Zayn agrees, not unkindly. He crosses his arms in front of himself. Liam sees the barest hint of pink on the tips of his fingers.

They stand there for a spell, tense and quiet. Though, Liam realizes, that’s mostly him—Zayn seems more like he’s waiting the silence out, perplexed but not cagey in the same way Liam is.

“How was the press conference,” Zayn asks finally. Liam wonders when the twenty-year-old became the poised one. Perhaps he always was.

“Utter shit,” Liam says. He remembers something, lips quirking tiredly. “Some bird gave me her number.”

Zayn’s fingers dig into his sides a little bit more. “Hope you kept it,” he says softly. So, so clearly. Eyes nearly sorrowful.

Liam feels his lungs puncture before Zayn finishes, “Her and I need to have a discussion about touching other people’s things.”

And just like that, the detective is breathing again. “Not a thing,” he reminds the boy, even as his blood warms at the implication of possessiveness, “and there was, as it happens, no touching.” He edges into Zayn’s space, hands ghosting over his sides.

Zayn yields to it slightly, edges softening as he sways into Liam until their hips are centimeters apart.

“Any good questions about the investigation?” the boy asks. “Anything not heinously boring and short-sighted?”

The detective shakes his head, eyes fixed on Zayn’s face, the coy bite of his lip when their eyes meet. “All the usual,” he murmurs, hands finally coming to rest properly on Zayn’s elbows. “What we know, what we don’t know, where the leads lead. Some omissions. Standard.” He massages the crook of Zayn’s arms with his thumbs until the boy starts to relax, unfolding them so that Liam can slip his hands around his narrow chest to press into his back.

“Did you tell them it was probably a bloke who’s been dead for a while now?” Zayn lets himself be hauled into Liam’s chest, breath warm on the fibers of his shirt. His hands slowly trace up from the hem of Liam’s shirt to the middle of his back.

“No,” Liam admits. “Don’t like to start speculation in the press if we can help it. They do that well enough without the Met’s involvement.”

“S’not gonna be speculation much longer,” Zayn notes. His voice is a sweet murmur near Liam’s collarbone, lilting and thoughtful like ten minutes ago never happened.

Always such a quick change, this mercurial boy. Liam squeezes him tighter, sure Zayn will slip into some other role if he doesn’t hold tight.

“Yeah,” he answers, delayed. “Looks like we’ve got him.”

 

It doesn’t snow on New Year’s Eve, but there’s frost on the inside of Liam’s window when his eyes peel open that morning. He cuddles under the blankets a bit further, leaving only one arm exposed.

He feels warm fur brush his wrist in a pattern of steady, sleepy breaths. He smiles, moving his fingers to drag through the fluff of Loki’s back while the canine snuffles dozy breaths.

He’s been healing fantastically, poor little guy. The sutured cut is gruesome against the sparse, dark hair that’s beginning to grow back around it, but Loki seems more bothered by the cone he’s been made to wear than anything else.

Zayn hasn’t exactly helped, toying with the pup’s ears and cooing to him about ‘picking up the premium channels.’ More than once, Liam has caught his dog’s gaze over Zayn’s shoulder, equally as unimpressed with the boy’s antics as the detective insists he is.

It hadn’t kept Loki from settling halfway in Zayn’s lap on Christmas morning, though, accepting the rumpled boy’s affection while he and Liam cuddled on the couch to watch a series of holiday movies Liam treasures and Zayn had never seen.

“It grew _three sizes,_ Zayn,” Liam gushed only a little sarcastically, poking at the boy’s pajama-clad knee to elicit a reaction beyond drowsy bewilderment.

“Cardiomyopathy isn’t a Christmas miracle at all,” Zayn said. “Does Whoville have doctors? He needs one. Badly.”

Later that day, Liam balanced a wrapped box on Zayn’s head as he passed, kissing the spot as the present slid into Zayn’s awaiting hands.

“You’re not gonna make me Christian with trinkets,” Zayn informed him, but the cast of his eyes spoke of quiet delight. “Stop trying to indoctrinate me.”

“I put up that calligraphy piece you bought,” Liam retorted around a piece of shortbread. He brought the tin to the coffee table, sitting fully opposite Zayn on the couch so he could watch him unwrap it. "Put it up that night."

Zayn grunts and makes no ceremony of it, clever fingers snicking up the flaps of the thick foiled paper and pealing it back enough to ease out the cubic box inside.

The detective smiled as he watched Zayn’s eyes widen a fraction. “Liam.”

“Open it,” he insisted gently.

Zayn shot him one short, unreadable look before lifting the dark lid on the box to reveal gleaming gold and polished quartz.

“You fucking arsehole,” Zayn muttered, shaking his head as he lifted the watch from its cushion. “How the _hell_ am I supposed to compete with this?”

“Aw,” Liam cooed, leaning over to smush Zayn’s cheeks between his fingers, “he _does_ like it.”

“What’s not to like,” Zayn griped, but he held still and let Liam put it on him all the same.

It’s resting on the bedside table now, Liam notes, matte and lovely and a little thinner than he personally prefers, better suited to Zayn’s slight wrists.

And it does suit him, flashes bright under his jacket or against his skin, the arm he’s left nearly bare of ink. Maybe gaudy on some, but oddly perfect for the imperious air that radiates off Zayn even in his trackies and oldest shirt. Grounding in a way that stands in counterpoint to the boy’s unpredictability.

Liam is obstinately glad that the lad’s trip he and Tomlinson would normally take in honor of the man’s birthday was off this year. Even if the day came and went and his fingers twitched to dial in the number he still hasn’t removed from his speed-dial. Even as he wondered what Tomlinson was doing to celebrate, instead of bugging Liam on the plane ride to Madrid or Athens or Amsterdam. Even if he had to figure out for the first time in half a decade what people _do_ on Christmas Eve, if not fuck off to a different country with a mate.

Get drunk on iced Bailey’s and Kahlua and fuck their way through the entirety of a Christmas standards album, apparently.

At any rate, he had the money that would normally go toward the three-day jaunt and nothing to do with it except wander into a department store and zone out to images of Zayn’s delicate wrists, the satisfaction he radiates when he’s treated like something precious.

The lump of blankets on the other side of the bed shifts. Emits a small groan.

“Up and at ‘em,” Liam coaxes, hand sliding from Loki’s back to Zayn’s exposed neck, the bird tattooed into the sensitive skin.

“Leave me alone, I’m on hols,” Zayn whines. He moves into the touch nevertheless.

Liam drags a nail softly down the nubs of his spine. “Gonna go grab breakfast.”

“Mmm.”

“What sounds good?”

“Food.”

“You’re the worst.” Liam props himself up on his elbow to watch the steady rise and fall of Zayn’s back, still wrapped in the dark duvet.

“Don’t care what,” Zayn mumbles into his pillow. “Don’t wanna get up yet.”

Liam rolls his eyes. He cranes his neck over where Loki lays between them, watching them interact with doggish contentment, and ghosts a kiss onto Zayn’s outer shoulder.

“Gonna bring back soggy bread,” he informs him sweetly, climbing out of bed.

“We already havestuffing,” Zayn grumbles, pulling the blanket up to obscure all but the top half of his head. “’S in the fridge.”

“Smartarse.”

“You made too much.”

“Do go on.”

“We’re gonna be eating it for a month.”

Liam finishes fastening his belt, striding over to Zayn’s side of the bed to kiss his temple. “Something fruity?”

“Yeah.”

“’Kay,” Liam whispers. He dresses and leaves quietly, locking the door behind him. It’s early and it’s cold, but it’s also New Years Eve and the only place he can trust to be open and have what he wants will be a madhouse already, he’s sure.

It is, so at least some element of the detective’s life remains predictable; the buzz of mumbled conversation in the queue nearly drowns out the mobile tone of a new e-mail.

Not quite, though. He thumbs across the screen to view it, vision zeroing in.

_Liam—_

_Glad to hear from you again. Hope this helps._

_—M. Bloom_

He shuffles forward in the queue, opening the attached document.

Their murderer has left them with so few patterns beyond M.O., sometimes the detective forgets that any exist at all.

Time of day is one of them. None of the ten murders took place before 5pm on any day, and none occurred later than approximately 2am any night. It’s indicative of some activity which keeps the killer busy during regular hours, something that requires them to be up early enough that a decent amount of sleep is necessary.

It’s more chilling, in Liam’s eyes, that their murderer is beholden to the same schedule as the rest of them. Normal in at least one respect.

Utterly unremarkable in their day-to-day life.

But it’s also a point of comfort, because it rules out anyone with after-hours obligations for the ten days on which the murders occurred.

Students with ridiculous ambition and double class loads, for example.

There’s a beautiful boy in Liam’s bed right now, likely fighting the pull of wakefulness and adjusting to the heat pouring out of the furnace Liam barely remembered to dial on before leaving. He’s likely staring out at the cold morning, taking in the start of the last day of the year before rolling off the mattress and padding to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He’s probably casting glances through the doorway to the entry, scratching the stubble around his full-lipped pout when he sees no evidence of Liam’s return.

The detective would very much like to clear that boy of suspicion beyond any reasonable doubt. He’d like to do it before Tomlinson decides to implicate him in a serial murder case.

So he scans Zayn’s attendance record, thankful that scientists and professors are the meticulous sort. He’s got the boy’s schedule fairly memorized, half concern in the wake of the note naming him and half force of habit from picking him up so often over the last semester.

Liam darts a glance up. Still two from the front of the queue. He looks back down, scrolling through the record to the first date of relevance.

“December 19th,” Liam mutters, pausing over the boy’s schedule.

It was a Thursday, Liam recalls. The air bit at his lungs when he took in heaving breaths outside the galleria where Eli Stokes’ body was found, preparing for the scent of death. A diligent detective. Always so ready for whatever the city’s monsters could throw at him.

He wasn’t ready, though. Not for the precision and certainly not for the brutality of it. The man’s hand, fastened delicately around his own heart like a lover’s grasp on a bouquet. The clarity of intent in the note left behind.

They got to the scene around five in the morning, but the body had been there since seven the night before.

Zayn has an independent lab until nearly eight on Wednesdays.

It’d been enough, that fact, to keep Liam from taking the insistent tingle in his spine seriously for months now. Zayn plays at carelessness every day of his life, but Liam’s never met someone half so studious. It’s one of the few constants he can rely on, glimmering gold in the shift of smoke that comprises Zayn’s soul.

He looks for the title, _Lab_ or _Independent Study_ or something similar, the red or green shading to indicate whether Zayn was accounted for by the lab attendant.

Liam’s thumb stills over the timeslot, stomach twisting.

Independent Lab, Zayn had told him. Only timeslot that worked, he’d said.

There’s nothing there.

“Excuse me.”

He flicks left, checking the week after. The week before.

“Sir?”

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Sir, if you—”

His last class is at _four_ on Wednesdays.

“—need to leave the queue.”

Reality snaps in around him, chilly lighting and disgruntled customers piling up behind him, the consternated clerk behind the counter eyeing him anxiously.

“Shit, I’m so sorry for that,” he rushes, placing his items at the end of the conveyer. “That was rubbish of me, terribly sorry.”

The concern bleeds from the clerk’s eyes, his hands passing the items over the scanner smoothly as he says, “No problem, sir, sorry about that.”

Liam dismisses the apology, offering another of his own. He pays and leaves quickly, rubbing at his eyebrow as he passes an older man with a look on his face that speaks of many a diatribe on today’s technology-obsessed youth.

“Dick,” Liam mutters under his breath.

Bag tucked into his arm, he ducks into an alcove on the sidewalk, scrolling back through Zayn’s records wildly. The dates appear in his head in the same typeface as the notes, clean and serifed and foreboding.

January 17th, the murder that brought Liam to Winston’s office to request being pulled from the case, only to be talked back into it.

February 26th, the day Loki threw up on Liam’s shoes and he thought _this day is going to suck_ before he ever set foot out the door.

On and on, months and seasons blurred by the smearing dread of the killer stalking London. March 2nd. April 8th. May 30th. June 13th.

July 5th, two nights after which Liam intercepted a mugging in an alleyway.

That’s one of the dates he has no way to account for, Liam realizes. There are three total, all taking place during the summer break for Queen Mary.

Of the remaining seven, five fall on days when Zayn was out of class well before they took place. Two are marked with the taunting red that means _Absent._

Liam adjusts the paper sack in his arm once more, swallowing heavily as he pushes his phone down into his pocket. Walks the rest of the way back to his flat with his jaw clenched, something throbbing and livid on his tongue.

The memory of that first night doesn’t leave him all day. Zayn puts on some film that’s shot in lurid pastels, clicking on subtitles so Liam can follow along. The boy snorts and mutters to himself in Urdu as the woman on the screen processes the news that she’s unable to have children, cuddling further into Liam’s side as the man strokes his arm idly.

Why was Zayn anywhere _near_ the crime scene that night? There’s nothing in his day-to-day life that Liam could imagine taking him into the business centers of the city, the high-rises and wide avenues there. No reason to cut through a part of London he never visits just to make it home.

Yet there he’d been, dispassionate with a knife to his throat, and shaking moments later as he wiped at his eyes.

Liam struggles to think back. His eyes. Copper-amber-whiskey-green, bright as flame when he’d lectured the Detective Inspector on the dangers of carcinogens. Thick brows quirked derisively as he spilled into the squad car, even thicker lashes shading intention all too well.

Thick lashes. Bright eyes. Liam is getting distracted, caught like gossamer on a jagged edge, lost in Zayn’s excruciating  beauty as he’s been from the start. From that first moment.

Had those eyes glossed with tears? Had those furiously wiping palms been calculated to keep Liam from seeing the total lack of moisture? 

Just another deception. Just a trick to get his way, right from the start.     

And the mugger—Liam can’t even remember his name, now, hasn’t given his file more than a cursory glance since it happened, already so ensnared by the dark, potent mystery of the flippant boy with the doe eyes and massive intellect—who had Zayn pinned against that wall. Why was it Zayn seemed so unaffected by it, the blade held to his neck? The tweaker with the blade, similar enough to the arsonists that knew Zayn by name to have Liam wondering: how much of it was risk-taking and how much of it was meant to draw in a very particular Detective Inspector?

Someone certainly wants to. Liam doesn’t have an inflated sense of importance, exactly, but there are ten notes held in evidence that seem to state rather clearly that _someone_ thinks he’s worth killing for.

Zayn shifts, shoulder blade jutting as he squeezes even tighter to Liam’s side. He’s wearing the watch and looks self-satisfied beyond reason, content in the curve of Liam’s arm while they burn sparing daylight in each other’s company.

_For my one and only,_ note number four had read, _Detective Inspector Payne._

Liam nudges his nose into the hollow behind Zayn’s jaw. Lays a gentle kiss there. Thinks.

Night falls fast the way it tends to in the long drag of winter. They head back to Zayn’s campus for only the second time since his classes ended for the semester, just long enough for the boy to dig out a dark, immaculate jacket and a pair of black trousers without stylized rips.

“Is this too dressy, or…” he checks, gaze contemplative in the bathroom mirror.

Liam shrugs from where he’s got his arms crossed, towel rack digging into his back. It’s not a large bathroom. “Do you care?”

“Pretty much never.” Zayn pulls something from under the sink, a tall can with a spray nozzle.

Any other day, the remark would make Liam smile. He watches Zayn disappear into a brief haze of sweet-smelling hairspray, different from his usual product, and then start messing with the top of it until it all sweeps vaguely forward, falling at an angle over his forehead.

“You’re gorgeous,” Liam remarks, “it’s not like anyone’ll be able to find the room to criticize you through all the drool, anyway.”

“Messy.” Zayn twists his expression, features elastic as he leans into the mirror. When he pulls back, he asks, “Why are we going to this thing, again?”

_Why don’t you ever want to do normal shit?_ “Because we were invited.”

“Bloke invited me to snort blow off his balls once,” Zayn says casually. “Didn’t mean I had to.”

Liam’s lips twitch down as he follows Zayn out of the bathroom. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Snort blow off—”

“Liam,” Zayn interjects, tone nearly reproachful where he stands in front of the detective to undo the top button of his shirt, “what’ve we said about asking questions we don’t want the answers to, hm?”

But he doesn’t bitch about the party any more than that the entire way to Karlie’s, up the inviting, clean-swept stoop to the rich wood door.

Liam hears Zayn mutter something about Kloss being a bit posh before the door is swinging open and a striking woman with cranberry-red lipstick is ushering them in.

“Big Payno,” she says conspiratorially, nose twitching in amusement as she pulls him into a hug.

“Shifty Swifty,” he returns easily. He wraps an arm around the waifish blonde.

Liam doesn’t mind Taylor at all, knows her mostly by the way the sergeant talks about her. Fond. Irritated. Fondly irritated, on especially long nights.

They’re on good terms, talk music at the occasional dinner party, and Liam has a moment of tight unease where he worries what her reaction to Zayn will be.

The boy is enchanting when he wants to be. He’s also, Liam knows, an absolute pain in the arse when he’s made to do anything he’d rather not.

Except when he looks over, Zayn is _on,_ eyes bright and smile sparkling. He shakes Taylor’s hand and leverages the move into a dainty kiss to the back of hand. The woman’s brow quirks as she allows herself to be charmed.

It’s like that for most of the night, Liam merely observing the impact Zayn has on the people around him as though viewing events through microfiche. The rich wallpaper and furnishings of the brownstone are ideal for parties like this, warm light and everyone glittering like an advert for holiday cheer. Liam sips at his scotch and catches up with the mutual friends he and Karlie hold—the woman herself seen every so often trailing after Taylor and talking her down from emergencies such as the shortage of croquettes—and watching Zayn drift around the room with a steady orbit of admirers in his wake.

He’s this perfect mix of boyish and effulgent, expressive and so luminous that to hold his attention for even a moment is to stare directly into the sun.

It’s a complete fucking sham, Liam thinks, draining his tumbler. A stellar performance, but it’s exactly that. He watches, perversely fascinated, as Zayn turns from where he’s holding court to sample the hors d’oeuvres on the bar tucked into the wall.

Like a candle guttering out, his expression flickers to devastating blankness. The detective watches, spine tingling cold, as the boy breathes out and is still.

So incredibly still.

“Bet he’d go to the big dance if you asked,” rumbles an amused voice to his left. Liam turns his head reluctantly to see Niall leaning next to him by the crackling fireplace, working his way through a plate of every appetizer offered, black bowtie loose around his grey shirt’s lightly starched neck. “Think he might fancy you.”

“Jeepers, Mister,” Liam responds flatly, eyes unerring on their sweep back to where Zayn is once again engaged in animated conversation. “Y’think he might?”

“Nah,” Niall denies. “Croquette?”

“Well I wouldn’t call him _that,_ ” Liam mutters distractedly. There’s a man the detective has never seen before—likely one of Taylor’s PR colleagues—leaning into Zayn’s space and making the boy’s eyes squint in amusement.

Liam doesn’t mind. Liam isn’t seventeen goddamn years old, so he doesn’t mind that Zayn is turning his hips so they’re better oriented to the man in front of him.

There’s a distant, nearly voyeuristic interest to watching Zayn like this. Liam wonders vaguely if the boy would do it if Liam weren’t right here, wrap one coaxing finger in the belt loop of the man and make some wicked, inviting comment while staring up through those obscenely glossy lashes.

He wonders if he might anyway.

“You’re kind of fucking hopeless about him, huh?”

Liam blinks, tries to clear the memories of nights where Zayn would stumble into his car smelling like someone else from his head. “What gave you that impression.”

Niall is silent when Liam turns to stare at him, though, and while his face is a little flushed with liquor, his eyes are too somber for the atmosphere of nearly-midnight on the only day that matters.

He knows that look. “What is it,” Liam asks quietly, turning to face Niall a little more.

The man shrugs weakly. His expression is still bleak when he says, just as softly, “D’you trust him?”

Liam feels his body cool a few degrees, despite the fire’s warmth and the scotch and festive atmosphere. He shakes his head minutely. “He’s just a flirt,” he says. “It’s nothing real.”

The comment is more layered than Niall could possibly realize, but the man’s expression sinks further like he does. “Not like that,” he says. “Liam, he’s. Do you ever think he might be a bit…”

Detective Inspector Horan is one of the most vibrantly eloquent people Liam knows, so it’s a bit startling to see him struggle for the right word.

The world doesn’t feel any better balanced when he finds it. “…off?”

Liam’s eyes flutter briefly closed, air whooshing out of his nose in a long exhale. It’s edging toward the same sentiment Tomlinson expressed—Tomlinson, conspicuously absent from tonight’s festivities, and Liam can’t help but feel that’s on him—and it sits just as poorly against his breastbone where it settles once again, heavy and implicating. 

The detective hears Zayn’s bubbling laughter, rich like cognac as it washes over whoever he’s talking to. Probably still that tall fellow with the shark teeth.

He can only nod, a small, momentous action, and not meet Niall’s eye. “It’s as good a word as any,” he admits quietly.

His fellow detective is silent, sounds of party and Ella Fitzgerald lulling around them. When Liam chances a glance into his eyes, there’s no accusation in the blue of them. “That’s no good, man,” Niall says with conviction.

Liam snorts a dark little laugh. “You’re the one who asked.”

“Last time I ask your arse anything about anything, then.”

They quip back and forth for a moment, insubstantial remarks to elevate the dark mood they’ve sunk into. Liam needs to remember not to drink with Irish blokes.

Even if Niall feels a bit like a godsend, some nights. Especially lately. With…everything.

Karlie calls over the small crowd, “Ten minutes, people!”

Liam’s gaze flickers to his watch—chunky and dark, so unlike the one he gifted Zayn—and notes that, yes, they’re minutes away from a new year.

The beginning, so they say.

He excuses himself, palm clapping Niall’s warm back gently as he turns back toward Zayn.

The boy is more or less where Liam saw him last, for once free of an adoring crowd. He’s swishing the gin in his glass, aloof and painfully lovely.

Liam closes a hand around his elbow when he reaches him. “Doing alright?”

Zayn gives him one of those spotlight looks, too bright and not enough like the moody boy Liam pulls into his arms every night. “Stellar.”

It’s an ugly word, too chirpy and bright coming from Zayn’s mouth. “Can we talk?” Liam grates out.

Expression never faltering, Zayn allows himself to be led out of the thick of the party, through a maze of narrow rooms that hint at the age of the building, before Liam finds a door to a small enclosed garden and ushers him through it.

Liam closes the door behind them and turns to take Zayn in, ask him one or any of the questions beginning to pile and crush him.

Zayn is already speaking.

“That Turner fellow is one of the least compelling blokes I’ve ever met,” he rattles off, “I nearly broke something when he told me he works in music video direction. Fucking tragic. And I’m pretty sure his brother’s been sneaking low-grade amphetamines to deal with everyone, he’s—”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Liam cuts in. He’s hazily aware that it’s clumsier than it needs to be, direct in a way that’ll trigger that reflex for lying that comes as easily to the boy as breathing.

The detective is ready for it. He sees, now, can’t _unsee_ the way Zayn so seamlessly plays rooms and situations and people. How little remorse he has over it.

For all Zayn is still a damnable mystery, he’s the thing Liam knows best. There’s nothing he can do, in this frozen little courtyard, that won’t tell Liam everything.

The boy’s expression goes neutral as he processes the accusatory tone. “I’m eloping with Karlie’s wife,” he says flatly. “She’s the scariest person I’ve ever met, it’s completely thrilling.”

“Save it,” Liam says, smooth and unrelenting. “Look, I’m giving you an option right now. Understand that I don’t _have_ to. Is there anything you want to tell me.”

Zayn’s guard is up in a way Liam hasn’t seen since those first weeks, posture radiating power and absolute control. Head tilted like the detective is something amusing and a little pathetic.

But there’s a glimmer, Liam notices, something in his winter-dark eyes that’s achingly familiar. Unable to play at distance with the person he spends every day murmuring his wayward thoughts and passing irritations to.

They’ve come so far, Liam thinks. They’ve not moved an inch since that first night.

Biting at his bottom lip, Zayn shrugs softly. “You’re not ready to hear it,” he whispers. It disappears on the white bloom of his breath, ghosts into nothingness with only the shiver wracking Liam’s spine to indicate it was ever there.

And he’s not wrong. “I think I might need to anyway,” Liam replies, throat thick.

Voices catch up to them from inside the house, fainter echoes from neighboring windows. A chanted chorus sung by the whole of London.

_Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…_

The two stand a meter apart, gazes matched as they hear the countdown like a condemnation.

Like a glimpse of what’s to come.

_Five, four, three, two…_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **To spoil the scene related to animal violence:** Loki gets hurt, lives, is fine. Bit miffed about the cone though.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Why didn’t you stop?” he asks. “After you had me. Why didn’t you_ stop?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey pals. I have something for you! It's chapter warnings:  
> 
> 
> **Warning for mentions of domestic violence, improperly handled D/s dynamics and slight dubcon and death of a minor.**  
> 
> 
> Oof, this shit gets dark. Uhh. Thank you to Monica and also Melissa, and thank you to all of you for your feedback and enthusiasm. Shoutout to my """street team""" (more like DIGITAL SUPER HIGHWAYYY) for spreading the hype, you guys are the coolest.  
> 
> 
> Come yell at me on tumblr at protagonist-m. Enjoy!

It’s the earliest part of the morning, the grayest part, when Zayn speaks. His voice spills low and deliberate into the humid warmth still settled between their bodies.

“Dopamine,” he says, “serotonin, oxytocin.”

Liam’s eyes slide open. Take in the shadows of his room. “What?” he rasps, and his voice is a parching reminder of noises he was barely conscious of making earlier, swelling moans that fell into Zayn’s mouth and then the sheets below.

“Dopamine,” Zayn repeats, syllables velvety, “serotonin, oxytocin.”

After a still moment, Liam turns to face him. He eases himself around, wary of noise. Careful.

So careful, lately. It’s been barely a week since the standoff in the garden and some despairing helplessness born then has made itself at home. A third figure in their bed.

“What are you talking about?” Liam whispers across the sheets.

Zayn’s eyes are dark wells. “All emotion is chemical,” he finally says. “Just deficiency and excess. Stimulus and synapse.”

Liam blinks gently, waiting.

“They conspire against us.” He skims his lips with a hint of tongue, voice thoughtful and slow. “Steer action through suggestions we don’t even know how to recognize. Let alone fight.”

The words roll over Liam like the murmur of distant thunder. They will his breath quieter.

“When we do work to recognize them, we learn how little is actually understood,” Zayn continues. “We know that dopamine surges make us high, abate our appetite, but we don’t know why simply looking at someone can trigger that. We know serotonin levels in newly paired individuals mimic those of OCD, but. We can’t fully explain the utility.” He goes quiet for a beat, gaze a gentle press across Liam’s features. “We know oxytocin releases during sex and makes us feel bonded. But we don’t know why, nine times out of ten, people still walk away.”

The shadows paint him nearly gray, arm soft and bare with his fingers curling toward his chest. “We know that any one of those neurotransmitters at improper levels can send us…spiraling. Paranoia. Schizophrenia. Insanity.” Steady as the tide, as a lovingly placed blade, Zayn says, “But we can’t explain why when they combine we call it love.”

Oxygen pulls from Liam’s system, empties him out until he’s asphyxiated and so very blue.

Zayn doesn’t say anything more. He only stares, face soft and tinged with night. Open, open, open.

They fall asleep like that, eyelids too heavy to hold the stare, something half-named filling the space between.

 

Headlines at the checkout proclaim that the reign of terror is over.

The Met has neither confirmed nor denied, but it’s the longest London has gone without a body showing up, chest turned inside out, heart in hand.

Nearly three months since the tenth body and the note naming Zayn, and speculation occupies the team entirely. They wonder if, as the heat on the case built, the killer foresaw their capture and  chose to run. If they followed in Samuel Huffed’s footsteps, earned his same pyrrhic victory.

Worse: they wonder if there’s a body waiting for them in some dim, airless space.

Liam spends the days of flurried conjecture scratching at the stubble he’s let weather his features and pressing his palms into the crescents under his eyes that appeared when sleep vanished. He keeps coming back to the same thought.

Their killer isn’t hunting the streets of London because they got what they wanted.

As a lone statement, it’s not enough. Not something the detective plans to bring forth until he’s sewn up every crimson thread of detail, but it rings like the truth. Blares loudly between his ears. A klaxon’s blast when he fights for sleep every night, spends hours boring holes into the back of the boy beside him. A whisper every morning when he offers a gently lingering kiss at the door.

Resting in his marrow, flowing thickly through his veins. Always there.

His evenings find him leaving the Yard, workloads he’d usually assume without complaint passed off to Horan or Delevingne. For a while, he timed the swirl of his coat so that he couldn’t see Tomlinson’s piercing gaze as he strode out the door each night.

It stopped mattering at some point. Days or weeks ago—Liam can’t decide. Doesn’t especially care; time moves strangely around him, sluggish and irrelevant. All the lies the same lies, all the questions the same questions.

He could do without the distraction.

Bloom had forwarded Zayn’s schedule the first day of term per Liam’s request. The detective paired it with an easy question about the boy’s course load that night while they snogged and bickered on the couch.

“Why?” Zayn had asked, rolling his jean-clad hips down over Liam’s own. “Neurochem get you hard? Or do you just wanna play professor.”

Liam sucked on the boy’s lip for a moment before pulling back. “Just curious. Interested.” A hot, open-mouthed kiss to Zayn’s jaw. “Y’know. Interested in you. As a rule.”

“That’s a bit perplexing,” Zayn answered, and Liam isn’t entirely convinced he bought it, but he rattled off his schedule while unzipping Liam’s flies regardless.

The small stub of a recording device Liam slipped under the couch between work ending and Zayn’s arrival at his flat had proved invaluable. Especially with how boneless and brainless the detective felt an hour later, throat still raw and mouth still swollen as he listened to Zayn’s breathing even out.

Bitter satisfaction washed over Liam as he sat hunched in the living room, laptop screen jarringly bright as he cross-referenced the schedule he’d had sent to him and the schedule he’d had spilled into his mouth.

The inconsistency was easy to spot.

_“Cellular degeneration lecture until seven-thirty—fuck, you’re so hard—but that’s only Mondays,”_ the recording had played back.

To the boy’s credit, he at least picked a class he’s actually taking this time around. Wrong day, though, and wrong timeslot.

“Gotcha, fucker,” Liam muttered under his breath, adjusting his earbud. He added the detail to the growing list in a document simply labeled _Zed,_ pulling out the thumb drive housing the digital file—as well as every other damning bit of audio and data—and tucking it away. Back into the bowels of a drawer filled with other shit that didn’t have a proper home.

Zayn stirred when Liam crawled back into bed. His side of the sheets still held traces of warmth.

“Mm?” the boy enquired drowsily.

Liam’s answer had been a soft shushing noise and a tender kiss to the nape of Zayn’s neck as the detective wrapped his arm back around him.

There’s that, too. Guilt. It sits heavy behind Liam’s eyeballs, weighs down his already fatigued muscles.

He wonders, between mechanical, meaningless day-to-day tasks and the time he’s meant to be sleeping, how it is a person can hold such a contradiction inside themselves. The urge to protect and expose someone, hold them both safe and accountable.

The question flares when he presses reverent touches into Zayn’s skin late at night, rubs his ankle in his lap under the table at dinner. When he wanders sleepless and half-dead into the kitchen on weekend mornings to find Zayn making spinach omelettes, hair wild.

When the boy dances artfully around even simple questions about his whereabouts, his schoolwork, his thoughts. When Liam slips the thumb drive out from its hiding place and works the pieces into jagged order.  When Zayn has got Liam under him and his eyes go dark, blunt nails scraping over the man’s heart like he could claw it out.

There isn’t an answer. It’s not the one he’s after, anyway.

So he holds Zayn close and builds his case, asks him about his day and tucks away every treacherous evasion. Meets his eyes and feels his heart throb in time with the toxic knowledge pounding through his veins.

Falls, and plans, and waits.

He’s staring into the dregs of his coffee mid-morning on a Friday sometime in late January.  There’s—something, Liam is fairly sure, that he’s meant to be doing. A file is open on his desk, grisly photos of a woman left battered and bleeding, found cold the day before in an old car.

It was the boyfriend, Liam thinks hazily. He’s not touched a single detail of the case yet, but it’s a sight so often repeated, pushed across his desk by one of his somber-eyed sergeants, that he almost doesn’t need to.

The first time a file like this one had been given to him, when working homicide had yet to burn away his naiveté and replace it with something harder, he’d gone home and sat staring at photos of his sisters. Swallowed against saline.

Now he just looks, sees the bruises and lacerations and pulpy gaps where teeth are missing, the imprints of fingers on blameless flesh. Wonders what their excuse will be when he knocks down their door.

It’s always something.

A triangle of dough and crystal sugar lands on the file. Liam lifts his head to see Horan hovering over him, eyebrows raised and lips pursed.

“G’morning,” Liam manages, dazed and unsure.

“Eat,” is Niall’s response. “You look about dead.”

It’s this thing the man’s been doing lately, Liam’s noticed. Mothering him. He thinks it might be related to the masterful silence Tomlinson and he are maintaining, coordinated even in this, some final unspoken agreement.

“I’m fine,” Liam mumbles, eyes dropping to the scone. It’s landed on a photo of the victim’s arm, lacerations overlapping. “I’m peachy.”

“You’re far from peachy, darling,” Horan tells him. His brogue always seems thicker in the morning. Harder to parse.

Maybe that’s just the cottony dizziness enveloping Liam lately. Last night was particularly bad for sleep; Zayn had been distant and glassy-eyed and irritable all evening. Hours after he’d finally twitched into a fitful sleep, Liam sat watching him, the slight grimace on his fine features even in slumber.

“I’m plenty peachy,” Liam grumbles, but he breaks off a chunk of scone anyway and pops it into his mouth, jaw creaking as he chews.

Horan makes a clicking noise like he doesn’t buy it. He lets it go, though, taps a finger on the case file. “How’s it coming?”

“Domestic homicide,” Liam mutters around another bite of pastry. He hadn’t eaten that morning, stomach acidic and uncooperative. “Boyfriend did it.”   

The other detective’s face falls, something dark claiming his features. “Prior record?”

Liam shrugs. “Probably.”

“Be sure,” Horan says. Registering his tone, Liam’s gaze snaps up to the man’s face. The coarse anger barely muted in his eyes.

Right. Sore subject, Liam recalls belatedly. The dull shame floods his belly.

“I’ll look into it,” Liam tells him. “I’ll let you know.”

Horan nods with a thin mouth and turns to head back to his own desk.

Liam rolls his head on his shoulders, moving what remains of the scone aside to view the case details. Wills his mind to focus on the woman left unjustly dead, abandoned in a shoddy sedan.

It really is as open-and-shut as he figured; even with a head that feels thick and eyes that feel dry, Liam works through the sound of the team coming and going as he gathers up the pieces of the file. He has enough evidence for an arrest within hours.

He tells Horan as much, sliding in his chair to the man’s desk and laying his head down on it as he informs him.

“Boyfriend has no alibi for the time of the murder,” he recites. “Usually works nights at a corner mart…didn’t show up for his shift.” Liam adjusts his arms where they cradle his heavy head, gaze drifting to the sideways view of the model cars Horan painstakingly constructs as a hobby. There’s two of them on his desk, a blue Chevy Bel-Air and what looks like a vintage Benz. “Two arrests for aggravated assault over the last decade. And uh, the lab should have. Results. On the blood under her nails. Tomorrow.”

Detective Horan’s jaw is tight when he nods. “Let’s go make an arrest.”

“You just got back,” Liam hedges, but the slate look in Niall’s eyes isn’t something he particularly wants to argue against, so he forces his aching body up from its slouch anyway.

“That’s the spirit, Peachy.” Niall growls out, like Liam could ever in a million years take him seriously.

 “You’re absolutely not calling me that,” he says, following Horan to the coat rack. “I’ll fling myself into traffic if that becomes a thing.”

“There’s our boy,” Niall coos, arm loose around Liam’s back as they head toward the back lot. He smells a bit like cigarettes and it’s nearly comforting, even if it makes Liam’s nerves spark with want. “Knew you just needed some food and focus to be back to your old self.”

Liam accepts the one-armed cuddle for a moment, leaning on the slighter man. “Coddle later. We have a piece of grade-A human waste to dispose of.”

The smile slips so quickly from Niall’s fair visage that Liam is briefly reminded of Zayn.

Master of quick changes that he is. Fascinating and slick as an oil spill’s dark sheen.

Those thoughts lead into others, darker and darker until Liam is tumbling down a rabbit hole. He’s quiet on the ride, hoping Horan will think it’s fatigue.

It is, he reasons. The insistent desire for transparency clashing with his self-preservation, leaving him stripped of energy. It’s just not _only_ that.

The flat is unremarkable, standard London drab. Liam has lived this moment a thousand times: knocking on the cheap door, reciting those same foreboding words, waiting for the click of the lock or the frantic shuffle on the other side.

It’s the click, this time, lock turning over and door swinging in. A slight man with wiry-looking brown hair stands there, features set like he’s preparing to look surprised.

Horan doesn’t give him the time to see it through. He’s through the doorway and hoisting the man up by the lapels in one quick motion, steps heavy as he drags him to the opposite wall and pins him there with a slam.

“Kyle Hackett?” he verifies, blue eyes steely.

Liam saunters in after him, gaze sweeping the flat. They’d lived together, the victim and Kyle, a little over three years now.

“Get _off_ me,” the man howls, writhing uselessly in Horan’s grip without leverage.

“We’re here because of Bianca. Yeah. Found her dead this morning, Kylie, you know anything about that?” Horan punctuates the statement with another short slam of the man into the wall, biceps bulging with the action.

It strikes Liam as odd, the nearly blank walls, because otherwise the flat looks fairly lived in. Afghan haphazard on the sofa, mug sitting on the coffee table.

No coaster, Liam notes.

“How’d you do it, mate? All those cuts.” Horan is breathing more or less directly into Hackett’s face, light through the window catching the blond in his hair and giving him the look of an avenging archangel. “Just any old knife, or did you have one picked out special? Did you dump it off like you did her? _Asking you questions, Kyle,_ ” he thunders.

Off near the bookshelf—more DVD’s than books, really—is a box filled with chunky framed photos, a mix of group shots and portraits, but mostly shots of two people posed side by side. Arm in arm.

From a distance, their smiles seem bright and genuine.

“She knew!” the man wracks out on the sobs that have overtaken him. “She knew what’d happen if she kept running her _bitch mouth,_ I told her—”

There’s another slam, harder than the first two. “Kyle Hackett, I am arresting you for the murder of Bianca Woodall. You do _not_ have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.”

The man struggles again, weaker. His face is red and wet and furious, guilty and manic and forlorn. Liam wonders if the bloke really thought it’d be that easy, disposing of the victim and all their shared memories. As if he’d watched her walk out the door last night, instead of beating her senseless and ending her life with something from the cutlery drawer.

“Anything you _do_ say may be given in evidence,” Horan snarls, still pressing the man to the wall with white knuckles, with the weight of his seething hatred. “ _Do you understand?_ ”

The man nods helplessly. He kicks out at the detective despite.

Horan doesn’t take too kindly to it. In fluid, unforgiving motions, he flips the man around and twists his arm behind him, pinning him back against the wall as he pulls the cuffs from his belt. “Piece of shit,” he mutters, clicking the cuffs closed.

Liam leads them out the door with a heavy tread, listening to the man sniffle as they descend the flights of stairs back out to the squad car. The daylight saps the flashing lights of their glare. He squints anyway, fishing in his coat pocket for his mobile.

“Got him,” he starts without preamble.

The brutal triumph doesn’t fade with the day, doesn’t give Liam a chance to settle his pulse. There’s adrenaline unspent in his system on the drive home. It makes him twitchy and hot.

It’s not entirely surprising that he finds himself under Zayn within an hour.

“Always take it so well,” Zayn groans, hips snapping into the flesh of Liam’s arse. “Love getting you on my cock, Li, shit.”

Liam digs his nails into the backs of Zayn’s biceps, unforgiving scrapes over the shifting muscle. “Y’got a filthy fucking mouth.”

“Yeah?” Zayn hikes Liam’s legs up a little further, thrusts deepening. “Says the man who told me to make it hurt.” The remainder of his breath leaves him in a hiss with the way Liam is tightening around him, reminding Zayn why he’d been so quick to comply.

“Never had someone ask for more, babe?” Liam counters. His eyes open enough that he can watch the movement of Zayn’s body, bare save for ink and the flush that always starts at his collarbones, all lean sinew working over him. Working him over.

“Jesus bloody fuck,” Zayn pants, “give you as much as you want if you keep doing that.”

Uneven breaths of laughter as Liam continues grinding his hips in tiny figure-eight’s. The motion makes his muscles burn, and God, it’s good. It’s so good.

Then he feels Zayn’s fingers dance along his throat, and it’s better.

His hand is light and still where it lingers against Liam’s overheated skin. When Liam flickers a glance up to see why, he realizes Zayn’s movements have slowed, dark eyes unwavering on Liam’s own.

It takes Liam a second to figure it out, fucked out and already sore in the best way. He’s breathy like he’s already had what Zayn’s offering when he says, “Please.”

Zayn’s bottom lip drops with the shudder of arousal that goes through him, makes his hips jerk, thumb and index twisting to rest on either side of Liam’s windpipe.

The detective feels it like a brand. Every sense is keyed into the slow tightening of Zayn’s fingers, the careful press as they take his breath. Automatic response flies through his mind, training, _disengage and subdue,_ but all he can do—all he _wants_ to do—is take it.

“So good for me.” Zayn slurs the words out, hand firmer against Liam’s throat. “Aren’t you.” His eyes are dark like coal and they burn just as well, smother Liam in their attention. “So goddamn good.”

And Liam might try to respond, detail just how good he could be for Zayn— _Zayn,_ some storm made nearly human—only he can’t. Doesn’t have the air left, between the hand at his throat and the hips shoving into him. The cock pressing at everything good inside.

It’s warm and a little blinding with how quickly it comes on, orgasm building somewhere deeper than Liam knows how to name. Hitting him harder than he can handle.

Every capillary sparks while Liam tries to ride it out, to survive it. It’s been seconds—a handful—since Zayn started pressing down, stealing his breath in the realest way, but it feels like an eternity while Liam rides the high, spills between their bodies.

Eons and moments later he hears the shaky murmur, what sounds like _baby_ and the stuttering smack of hips as Zayn gets close.

Sounds like it’s coming through a tunnel, though, and that’s wrong. That’s—Liam’s head feels empty save for echoes, feels useless above his—

“Zayn,” he tries to say. Can’t.

The world isn’t quite sitting right, spinning just enough to confuse Liam and make him unsure if the look on Zayn’s face is pleasure or something that’s dark at the edges like his vision, narrowing slowly in on the picture. The boy’s hips are still working, a burn that feels surreal. Distant.

“ _Zayn,_ ” Liam mouths, panic a haze overtop the other hazes, the sated arousal and the dizzy confusion, a pulse all its own under the insistent pounding of his heart.

The boy’s hand feels like lead, now, a hard weight blocking Liam’s system from receiving oxygen even as he slams into him, fucking him through an orgasm that leaves Zayn’s face twisted, teeth bared. He says something and it could be anything, could be a taunt or a confession or Liam’s name. Could be all of them at once.

Liam thinks fuzzily that Zayn looks half-feral over top of him, lips snarled, eyes black. He’s still beautiful. Always beautiful, isn’t he? Always lethal. Liam feels the realization work through his system, numb him out with a shock of understanding.

Briefer than conscious thought, he feels the sensation of restraints on his legs, his arms. A blade at his throat instead of Zayn’s fingers. He sees the shine of his eyes like something terrible and wild.

Probably, it’s an honor to die at the hands of such unknowable forces.

The thought shimmers and dies as Liam brings one heavy arm up to crash into Zayn’s side.

He lurches with the impact. Zayn’s hand loosens enough on Liam’s throat that he can take a staggering breath in, cough desperately from the sudden influx of oxygen. He’s gagging on air, practically, throat sore, but he shoves until Zayn falls backward, pulling out of him with no grace.

He hasn’t moved by the time Liam’s regained his breath enough to gasp out words. “What the _fuck_ was that?”

“I took it too far,” Zayn says with zero hesitation. His gaze is directed at the ceiling, chest rising and falling at level intervals. There’s a tremor in his fingers, though, a twitch to the hand he had pressed into Liam’s neck.

Liam isn’t quite sure what it means. “Jesus Christ, Zayn. I.”

They’re quiet for a moment, Liam’s eyes on Zayn and Zayn’s still on the ceiling, painted in uneven gold by the bedside lamp.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” Liam decides. “We shouldn’t—that was dangerous, Zayn, fucking hell.”

“I know,” Zayn says, “but cyanosis hadn’t even set in yet, it wasn’t—”

With quiet, punishing inflection, “You could have crushed my windpipe. You’re not thick, you understand how close that got.”

“I _know._ ” Zayn’s eyes finally move, find Liam’s across the bed. “I know, alright? I get it.”

“Then why didn’t you stop?” It’s a demand, albeit a shaky one. Liam is sore in ways that aren’t pleasant, now, arse throbbing and heart stammering. Throat raw.

Zayn’s jaw clicks when he swallows. “I lost control.”

Such a straightforward delivery. There’s heat in Liam’s fingertips, chasing out remnants of numb fear. He wants whatever Zayn isn’t saying. Covets the unspoken words fiercely.

He’s got his mouth open in the hopes something useful will roll off his tongue when his mobile rings, vibrating on the dresser.

The detective’s mouth dries. There aren’t many reasons for him to be receiving a call this late.

None of them are pleasant.

“You gonna get that?” Zayn murmurs, eyes watching Liam’s face.

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move.

“Liam.”

He wonders what the breaking point is. Wonders if it’ll be loud when it happens, explosive, or just a brittle silence that leaves him hollow.

“Li,” breathes Zayn, and he’s kneeing toward him across the bed now. His hand is hesitant, hovering just above the dip of muscle between Liam’s shoulder blades, but his lips are close to the nape of Liam’s neck. “Babe, you’ve gotta answer it.”

The shrill ringing dies only to be renewed a breath later, underscoring the boy’s quiet words. Ironic that Zayn would be urging him toward it at all, Liam thinks.

Face pinching inward, he takes a hard inhale and nods, eyes closed.

“That’s right,” Zayn whispers into his ear. “That’s right. You’re fine.”

It’s a lie, but it’s a pretty one. It abates the acid in Liam’s veins. Makes him feel nearly normal.

He rises, swipes the phone off the dresser. Presses it to his ear and opens with, “Another one?”

A beat of silence. Then, “Yeah,” Kloss says, tone heavy and hunted at once. “Yeah, another one.”

The detective moves as slowly as he can convince himself is acceptable. His hands are clumsy on each button of his shirt, movements stilted.

He wonders when Zayn did it. While Liam was making an arrest with Horan, maybe. Riding a different, bitterer high.

_I lost control,_ he’d said. He’d meant it.

Zayn sits with his legs hanging off the side of the bed, watching Liam with giant, passive eyes.

He’s not passive, though. Can’t be, some being of destruction as much as he’s a boy made of skin and bone. Liam slips into his boots and doesn’t meet his gaze.

He does, however, take a second to cup the back of his head, press his lips to his brow.

“We can’t do that again,” he murmurs, “can’t—have you touch me like that, if control is an issue.” He exhales against the warm skin and says, “But. We don’t have to talk about it.” He pulls back, hand guiding Zayn’s face to look up at him. “We don’t, Zayn. Honestly.”

Something ripples in Zayn’s expression, careful composition wrinkled by the set of his mouth, the tiny furrow between his eyebrows. It’s a pale and distant cousin of surprise, but Liam has traced Zayn’s expression for innumerable days, now, and he knows that it’s there.

He knows Zayn wasn’t expecting reprieve.

Exhaustion isn’t forgiveness, though. Giving up is different from moving on.

It’s only that it’s ceased to matter. So close to the fall, Liam’s stopped caring just how they tear each other apart on the way down.

He keeps one hand on the wheel and one on the tender skin of his throat all the way to the scene of the crime.

 

What darkens the world—that’s Liam’s livelihood.

Years now of listening to the creeks in the walls, tracing the smears of blood back into the dark room, staring into the shadowy passageway. Peeling back the layers of the city like skin from muscle and muscle from bone, digging deeper still until he reaches marrow—that’s what Liam does. It’s what he’s good at, observation and connection and conclusion. Light into darkness.

There’s no light here. No reason, no logic, no way to make it anything but what it is.

“Time—” he manages before his throat rebels, constricts.

Four steady breaths. No one begrudges the interruption.

No one wants to make this real.

“Time of death,” Liam grates out.

Tomlinson stays kneeling, head down toward the victim. Toward mottled skin and exposed organs, already so far along despite the frigid air.

Toward the heart, clasped in such a small hand.

Liam closes his eyes, breath ghosting out in a brittle plume. “Doctor Tomlinson.”

It takes a moment for the pathologist to speak. “Less than twenty-four hours,” he says, normally high rasp of a voice grave and low. He traces a gloved finger along the victim’s throat, blue-green skin stiff with rigor. “He was alive less than twenty-four hours ago.”

Less than twenty-four hours ago, he would have been leaving school. Walking out of the doors on the other side of this building, looking forward to Friday. To the weekend.

None of them had paid much mind to the Child Rescue Alert issued last night beyond standard diligence. It didn’t fit the M.O. for their killer, abducting a twelve-year-old, and it’d taken place before the hours the killer was known to be active.

Horrible and gut-clenching, a tragedy if it wasn’t solved, _massive_ pressure for their colleagues who headed the search, but not theirs to focus on. Not with a serial killer unaccounted for while the press kept spinning stories of the investigation coming to a close. Of disgraced officers unable to catch the most high-profile killer in London this century.

Even the jaded among them who had watched the disappearance of schoolchildren play out a dozen times hadn’t thought to expect it. They didn’t think for a moment that this body would be _their_ body.

Their weight to carry.

Never has there been a crime scene this quiet, Liam is sure. Even the din of passing traffic seems muted, the world hushing in somber deference to what’s occurred.

Tucked behind the walled-off skip belonging to the secondary school, the boy is past harm but still so fragile. The team moves as if trying not to wake him, voices soft as they begin their sweep.

The air is thick and cold and unforgiving when Liam breathes it in, casts his eyes around the scene. His life is observation. That fact has never seemed more unbearable than it does right now.

It means he has the privilege of knowing the moment each member of his team breaks.

First is Delevingne. When they fish the child’s small navy rucksack out of the skip, her hand flies over her mouth as a choked noise falls from her lips, eyes crashing shut.

Kloss is undone by the sight of Tomlinson gently covering the boy’s hands in plastic. Tomlinson himself gives one sharp inhale when he goes to remove the little red trainers, jolting to his feet and pacing out of sight, shoulders already shaking.

Nelson doesn’t stop letting out tiny whimpers the entire time she’s taking her photos, finger careful on the button, lip shaking as she presses her teeth into it until Liam fears she’ll bleed.

There’s a nearly silent chant issuing from Cabello’s mouth, _I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,_ as she lays out and documents individual items in the boy’s rucksack: An unopened carton of milk.  A green plastic  pencil case adorned with an array of alien-themed stickers, overlapping and clumsily applied. A notebook which bears a name in looping, amateur cursive on its front cover.

Below the name is written _THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE_ in uneven block letters, squiggles radiating from it meant to indicate the importance of the statement.

Horan, he notes, simply starts broken, face collapsed inward like a knife lays buried in his ribs. His face is ruddy under the bright orange light on the back of the building as he takes the student ID recovered from the rucksack, gruffly informs Tomlinson they’ll need dental records to confirm identity due to the state of decay.

For Liam, it’s the note.

It’s always the fucking note.

_For: Detective Inspector Payne. My deepest apologies that your gift was late._

A memory bobs to the surface, something ghastly in a dark pool.

_How the hell am I meant to compete with that?_ Zayn had asked, staring down at the gleam of gold on the face of the watch.

This doesn’t compete. This doesn’t _compare._

Liam doesn’t _want_ this.

He nearly crumples the note from the force of anger that courses through him, dropping it like it’s scalded him. The gravel of the school’s car park crunches under his toes as he paces further and further away from the spill of the emergency lights, the smell of death.

The reality of his role in all of this.

It’s Horan who catches up to him, finally. Of course it is. Palpably hurting, steadfast and dogged despite, of course it’s Horan who finds him where he’s hunched into a corner by the school’s entrance with his head against the bricks.

“Payne,” he says. “We need you back there.”

Liam swallows. “I know.” He’s dying for a cigarette. Hasn’t smoked in weeks, can hardly stand the itch of desire clawing up his throat now. “God, I know.”

It’s quiet, wintry city noise and not much else. Liam hears a sound like the other detective is bracing himself. “It’s not your fault—”

“It _is_ my fault!” Liam wheels to face him. “It’s _always_ been my fault, I’m—I’m what they _want,_ I’m the one whose attention they’re after!”

Horan looks young when he shakes his head, eyes puffy from the toll this night has taken. “Liam—”

“They’ve _had_ my attention,” the detective continues, “undivided, for months now. They didn’t need—they didn’t need to—”

“Sick people don’t think that way!” Horan insists, gesticulation bordering on frantic. “They don’t think like you, okay?” He gets closer to where Liam is shaking, fingers clawing into the detective’s biceps. “It’s a _compulsion._ Even when it’s premeditated. Even when it’s ritualized. It’s a disease and it’s a _fucking_ crime, not an act of _blame_.” Horan breathes out, air ghosting between them. “No matter how they dress it up. No matter what they _say._ Liam, it’s _not. On. You._ ”

Liam can’t believe that. “There’s a child dead.”

Horan sucks in a harsh breath, like he’s processing it all over again. Then his gaze hardens and his jaw sets. “Then do your job,” he says. “Make sure it’s the last.”

His hands drop from Liam’s arms, warmth instantly missed as the air bites through his coat. The other detective walks away, leaving Liam to sort himself.

Every second spent closing out the scene finds the team stewing in their personal hells.

They manage. Somehow, they manage. It’s marginally easier once the body is moved and they start combing for evidence, when they can separate the crime from the outcome.

It’s still too quiet.

Back in the office, eyes rimmed pink and mouths chapped from biting at them in the harsh winter air, Liam stands in front of them at the long table, hands clasped at his waist.

“Each of us made the conscious choice at some point to do this job,” he begins. “We made that choice even knowing what we might see. What we might be called upon to examine.” The room is silent, not even an echo of his words finding its way back to him. “We do this,” he says. Falters. “We do this because we’re the ones who can. Not—not everyone can do what we do. Not everyone has the stomach for it, or the mind, or the courage. This is the ugliest it gets, the very goddamn worst, and. I know that it feels like you made the wrong call, however long ago it was that you decided to make this your life.”

Their eyes are all so tired. The detective soldiers on. “You’re not idiots—you’re the furthest thing from stupid, all of you, so I don’t have to tell you the next few days will be brutal. The press is going to be hell. The pressure is going to be unlike anything you’ve ever dealt with.” His jaw clicks from how he can’t help but clench it. “If you couldn’t handle it, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have made the choice you did. You wouldn’t have been chosen for this assignment. You can _handle_ it. Know that, even if you can’t believe it right now.”

Liam exhales, spent of words. He eyeballs the clock.

It’s barely past dinnertime. Somehow, this night of impossible length has only stretched until dinnertime. “You’re all dismissed. Go home and do what you need to do to be ready for tomorrow. This is the last body he’s leaving us.”

There’s nothing left after that, tired nods and drawn-out breaths, so Liam gathers his things and joins the silent shuffle to the door. The team splits off in twos and threes, no one fully willing to walk alone.

Winston is suffering along with the them, for once. He’s solemn and unsettlingly quiet as Liam goes over the scene details in his warm office.

The rucksack. The ID. The body.

The note.

Offering a heavy nod, the man lets Liam go with his eyes downcast.

“Hold on to something you love tonight,” Winston advises him as a parting remark. “Try to remember what’s good about the world.”

Liam doesn’t tell him that those are contradictory notions for him, that the things he cares for hold far too much venom to remind him of what makes the world good. He doesn’t tell him of the darkness they possess.

Neither of them bothers saying goodnight as they part outside Winston’s office door.

Liam shuffles down a flight of stairs, steps silent and efficient, until he’s nearly to the end of the hall. There’s one door and another, and then—

The security camera has this issue where, if the auxiliary cord isn’t plugged all the way in, the provided image fuzzes and blinks out for odd intervals.

Liam squeezes himself just past the door into the corner that isn’t covered by the camera. He slides a hand up the wall, angle awkward with how he’s keeping it out of frame, and tugs very slightly on the cord where it hangs down, fingers barely catching it.

He pulls until it leaves its plug-in just enough, then waits a moment and breathes against the wall. It’ll be a few minutes before one of the lads in the office notices the dodgy video for this particular evidence room. It’ll be another couple before they trundle up, shoes squeaking on the tile, to fix the obnoxious technical difficulty. He has time. More than he needs.

Still, a fuzzy shadow appearing on the corrupted recording as the camera stops functioning properly is bound to draw attention. He needs to give it a second, let the situation settle so that it could have conceivably happened before he got here.

When he deems enough time has passed, he moves into the long, narrow room quickly.

The crate of evidence from tonight is easy enough to spot, clearly labeled and marked with a blue line of tape that indicates it still requires processing by the lab.

They could have done it tonight, if Liam hadn’t just sent Tomlinson and the rest of the team home.

He pulls the plastic crate of meticulously bagged and labeled objects out—anything from the scene that may hold trace evidence, anything found within a meter of the body itself.

It doesn’t take long to find what he’s looking for.

The detective continues digging forearm-deep in the crate. He carefully slides the narrow, bagged object up the sleeve of his peacoat before using his own hand to pull a piece of evidence out at random.

A piece of notebook paper found crumpled at the bottom of the boy’s bag. There are notes for what looks to be maths covering on side of it, graphite fading from wear.

He stands there in view of the camera, pretending to consider it. His other hand slides into his pocket as he hunches his shoulders forward, like he’s fighting a chill.

The item he concealed slides from his sleeve into the depths of his coat pocket, not so much as an indent on the woolen outside to hint at its existence.

Liam is still standing there staring blindly at the old paper when the door opens.

“Inspector Payne,” greets the boy.

“Ashton,” Liam returns, tone distant.

The kid seems to realize what Liam is here for; when he speaks next, his tone verges on somber. “Hell of a night.”

The detective makes a show of turning the baggie over in his hand before dropping it back with the other pieces of evidence, head falling forward slightly. “You wouldn’t believe,” he says, tone pitched low and gravely. Then, as if it’s just occurred to him, “What’re you doing back in processing?” A grim little smile. “Did we hit a limit on bookings?”

Ashton gives a little chuckle, leveraging up onto the side of a shelf to more easily reach the cord. “That’d be a fucking sight. ‘No vacancies,’ we’d tell them. ‘Sorry, do commit your petty thefts a bit earlier in the night next time, thank you.’”

Liam gives a small, reluctant laugh, as if his lungs are too heavy to push it out properly.

“No, uh, the camera’s acting up again,” Ashton explains, straining up and pushing the cord until the silver of its end disappears back into the socket. “Went dead for a minute there.”

Bringing his eyebrows together, Liam turns to face the kid with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He traces his index over the rough corner of the evidence bag. “Seems like a bit of a technical oversight.” The lights overhead are buzzing audibly.

“Yeah, well,” Ashton shrugs, lowering himself from the side of the shelf and opening the door, “supposedly they ordered us a new system in December, but. _I_ haven’t seen it.”

“Sounds about right,” Liam drawls, following him out into the hall.

“Does, doesn’t it?” The boy makes a face, _what can you do,_ and turns the corner to the staircase with a little wave in parting.

Liam lets out a long exhale, hands stuffed back in his pockets as he makes his way out of the station.

It hits him when he’s finally in his car headed home—the faintest hint of the smell, lingering. Lavender and leather and something woody.

They start flooding in, then, the thoughts he’s been battling to contain all night. Unproductive in those first moments when objective observation is critical. So heavy they threatened to cloud his vision every moment after.

But he’ll only revisit the crime scene in nightmares, now, and there’s nothing to keep the thoughts from rushing back.

When they do, they’re torrential. Drowning out the sounds of traffic around him, the rain on his windshield, the tick of his turn signal as he pulls into the space outside his flat.

A child. A _child,_ a little boy, someone weaker and smaller and unable to defend themselves even at all, innocent and rightfully unsuspecting of the world’s darkness. Crimes are committed every day on the streets of London, petty and violent alike, but there’s only a very particular type of individual, barely human, that preys on the most vulnerable of society. It surpasses cold and calculated, speaks of malevolence held bone-deep. The kind that drives a diseased mind to injure _kids,_ find satisfaction in that ungodly action. Inseparable from the core of a person, that sort of ill will.

Evil. One would have to be evil, to extinguish the life of a child.

Liam climbs the stairs to his flat, thoughts drenched in bile. Someone capable of that sort of violence—that sort of evil—is capable of nearly anything. That brand of careful, deliberate atrocity takes time and planning and _skill_ uncommonly found, a blend of malice and patience, hot and cold rage.

It takes a very particular type of person.

The flat is empty when Liam unlocks the door. It’s quiet save for the patter of Loki’s feet as he comes to sniff at Liam’s shoes, see where he’s been.

Liam leans down to kiss the dog’s fuzzy little snout. “Hey, baby. Sweet boy, how’re you?” He murmurs tired nonsense as he unlaces his shoes, sets them by the door.

The detective pulls back and reaches into his pocket, fingers curling around the thin object nestled there. He pulls it out and removes it carefully from the evidence bag, careful not to touch the relevant end.

A pen. Wholly unremarkable, cheap and disposable and ubiquitous. Forgettable.

Liam had seen Cabello lift it from near where the body had lain. Watched the spotlights, positioned on the scene in the darkness, create jagged shadows over the teeth marks on the pen’s cap where it was stuffed onto its blunt end.

Chewed to shit, like it was compulsive.

Such a little thing. Unmemorable as the pen itself.

It’s likely a testament to how deep Liam’s in it that his mind immediately jumped to the look of Zayn tucked into the end of the couch, notes in his lap and pen in his mouth. Pearly incisors appearing from behind his plush lips as his eyes scanned equations and meticulous diagrams, biting into the plastic as he thought.

Pen-chewing isn’t much of a pet peeve for Liam, which is good with the frequency at which he’s watched every cap in the pen cup he keeps on his desk disintegrate under the assault.

He did ask about it once, though.

“Oral fixation,” Zayn had muttered, only looking up briefly to flash Liam a dirty grin that had his heart spasming with affection.

He examines it for a second, the familiar look of teeth marks making the cap’s surface go ragged, then tucks it into the drawer holding the jump drive. The detective takes the evidence bag and balls it up, opening the kitchen bin and stuffing it under a layer of random food scraps and paper.

Liam is still scrubbing his hands in the kitchen sink when the front door opens.

“Li?”

The detective stills, faucet running over his immobile hands. “Kitchen,” he calls.

“Don’t start cooking,” Zayn replies, thud of his boots being toed off in the entryway, “I picked up a Chinese.” Over the sound of rapid panting noises, “Hey, little fluff.”

Liam braces himself and stares at the bottom of the sink. It could use a wipe down.

“I had this thought today.” The boy appears in the kitchen, heavy brown bag of fried food warm and pungent in his hand. “Why does Bruce Wayne not invest more heavily in biochemical research? He’s—”

Liam flicks off the faucet and turns to fully face him. He dries his hands on the cloth hanging in the handle of the fridge door, listening to Zayn chatter for a moment before he cuts in, “I need you to do something for me.”

Zayn pauses mid-word, still gripping the takeaway bag. “Depends on what you think you need.” There’s something about the cast of his eyes that makes Liam think he’s expecting the detective to bring up what happened earlier, make him talk about it even after he swore they didn’t have to.

It’s worse than that. He’s been working up to it for hours now, but it doesn’t make it easier. “I need you to tell me what you were doing between four and eight o’clock yesterday evening.”

It’s not _how was your day._ It’s not _what’s been on your plate, sorry I’ve been so busy at work,_ and Liam can watch the precise difference work its way through Zayn’s mind, settle into his rigid limbs.

“Class,” the boy says, indifference flaking like dried blood. “Met with my advisor. Painted, it’s—it’s not done yet. Showered. Came over here.”

Last night, Zayn had walked through the door and immediately crawled into Liam’s lap on the sofa. One hand pulling the remote from Liam’s grasp and the other palming his cock through his jeans, lips hot on the detective’s before so much as uttering a _hello._

They hadn’t made it to the bedroom.

Liam feels sick thinking of it, now. Zayn’s eyes dark as whiskey as he hovered over him, that unquantifiable adrenal spike making his chest flush so beautifully and his mouth dropped barely open with how good it felt to be with Liam in such a tactile way. Pulling the detective in with the weight of his body, the rasp of his laugh. Chaotic and intoxicating.

It had seemed so random.

There’s tension curling between them, spooling and spooling and pulling taut where their gazes meet and lock across the room.

“You’re lying,” Liam says quietly.

Zayn raises an eyebrow in a decent impression of taking offense. “Why the _fuck_ would I lie about my boring Thursday?”

Liam licks his lips, unblinking. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.” His tone is still level, low. There’s no reason to raise his voice.

There’s only one way this can end.

The affront slides from Zayn’s face, black treacle dripping thickly away. His arms come to cross his chest. Defensive just like Liam is. Loki pads into the kitchen, snuffling at the tile.

“What is this?” Zayn asks.

The end of the line, Liam thinks. “It’s me, asking you, where you were yesterday.”

Zayn’s voice is acid, eye contact never wavering as he bends to scratch at the top of Loki’s head. “Well, since we’re ignoring the fact that I _already told you—_ ”

“Don’t touch him,” Liam rushes.

Both the dog and boy look up at the intensity of his tone. Zayn pulls himself back up to full height, withdrawing his hand from Loki’s head. Liam is reminded of a viper cornered.

“What about Wednesday night?” Liam pushes. “Bio lab until eight, right?”

Liam watches it like a play as any trace of expressiveness fades from Zayn’s features, something detached and calamitous taking its place.

“Why do you have my schedule, Liam,” Zayn asks, chillingly blank.

The detective’s fingers twitch where they grip his sides. “That is absolutely the least of your worries.”

Zayn looks like he might disagree, but Liam—Liam stood over the body of a child mere hours ago. 

He knows who put it there.

“Why didn’t you stop?” he asks. It’s a broken record repetition in his head, words he gasped out earlier tonight under circumstances far removed and far too similar. He’s not surprised they’ve found their way past the inadequate fortress of his teeth again. “After you had me. Why didn’t you _stop?_ ”

Loud, the words are loud in the little kitchen. They ring and refuse to disappear.

Liam’s ears are ringing, too. He can hardly recall what it feels like not bleeding adoration for this unholy fucking boy, this gorgeous goddamned specter.

He doesn’t _get_ it. Mind and body, down to his festering core—he’s poisoned by this, doomed to it. Zayn has had him for nearly as long as Liam’s known his name.

Surely he knows that.

“Stop—?” Zayn begins.

“Don’t,” Liam barks, surprising them both. Quieter, “Don’t. Not a word.” He breathes, eyes hateful on Zayn’s stony features. Chiseled marble. “Not unless it’s the truth.”

The truth doesn’t come. Of course it doesn’t. Zayn has spent longer than Liam can guess putting it all together, every incision and note card and _stolen life,_  arranging it just right to get them so hopelessly tangled they’ll never be free.

The detective could put him behind bars with a call. Could blow the lid off this thing tonight, end it where it began: bathed in the lights of a siren.

He’d still never get Zayn out from under his skin.

“I don’t owe you the truth, Liam.”

Zayn’s tone is harder than the man’s ever heard it. His face wears demonic shadows that haunt Liam’s scarce sleep, and the man sees it clearly, finally, the person under the excessive beauty and dazzling charm. He sees the man who is manipulative and unfeeling, cruel and cunning and reasonless despite. Zayn looks, in the poor kitchen lighting, every inch a monster.

He is one.

A searing zip of awareness races up Liam’s spine. The detective holds so much knowledge, now, the ability to prevent so much potential suffering at the hands of the demon who’s had him since the very start. End the terror and grief for the people of the city he swore to protect.

That’s not a game he can afford to lose.

And so he must play very, very carefully.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he acquiesces, siphoning the absolutely morbid sorrow he feels into his expression, letting it show as contrition. “I’m—today’s been awful.” He shakes his head slightly, disbelieving. “Today was a nightmare.”And it’s not a lie.

Liam waits for the slide of expressions, Zayn’s costume change of projected emotion. He waits and holds the pained, apologetic pinch of his features, refusing to be outdone.

It comes after a long moment. Starts in the boy’s eyebrows, works its way across his face like a mask’s been pulled over his head. Exactly long enough that it could be natural, the way his expression falls to reluctant forgiveness.

Manufactured. Terrifying as the rest of it.

“What happened, Li?” Zayn asks. His voice is raspy and nearly sweet, a dry liquor. Intoxicating in its promise of comfort in his arms, if Liam can only get there.

The idea of touching him right now makes the detective feel ill. Unimaginable, really, curling into the embrace of someone who crouched over the prone form of a child and left them cold and hideously open. It has his muscles twitching. Random tics he disguises by explaining the horrors of his night, movements he passes off as spasms of discomfort.

“The boy who went missing,” Liam tells him, “we found him behind his school. Same as the others.”

Lean surprise registers on Zayn’s face. Liam almost tells him not to bother.

“I thought Sam—” Zayn’s lips twitch minutely down. “I thought your killer offed himself weeks ago.”

Right. That little lie. Liam can feel his jaw flicker when he clenches it. “We were wrong.”

“Shit,” Zayn breathes, steady. He still doesn’t look scared. He still doesn’t look like a man caught. Briefly, Liam fantasizes about reaching into his mouth, down into his throat. Twisting him around from the inside until he resembles something closer to human. Until his face offers any fucking clues.

The thought burns in his esophagus the second he thinks it. He remembers the piece of shit Niall held against the wall and arrested earlier, sniveling as he reached for justifications that would never hold.

He thinks of Zayn’s hand on his own throat.

_That’s_ the type of man who resorts to violence unprovoked. Zayn is something terrible, but he’s standing in Liam’s kitchen with his _shoes_ off, slighter than him and only deadly in his very specific way. Young and disturbed and unsuspecting of how disastrously things have changed between them.

After everything, Liam would still rather break his own fingers than raise a hand to Zayn.

“We never thought the killer would target someone so young,” he says instead. “It’s a coward’s move. Contemptible and evil and gutless.” There’s a hint of reprimand to his tone he works to keep out, trading it for the ample disgust he feels. “I’ve never—I’d never pitied this fucker until tonight, I realized. Sinking so low, even for a maniac.”

Liam watches Zayn’s face for a flash of anger or offense. Satisfaction, maybe.

No such luck. Zayn is better at this game.

“You still need to eat,” Zayn says. Which—what?

“What?” Liam asks.

The boy shrugs, gaze thoughtful and a bit softer than it’s been. Liam’s heart lurches with how much he wants to believe it, that softness. “It’s called your—generally, your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated by acute stressors, like when we—the thing earlier. But—” he scratches at his eyebrow, gaze finally falling to the floor. “Because your job has fairly uncommon stress as an everyday, your _sympathetic_ -pituitary-adrenal axis is actually. What’s kicked in. Which causes decreased appetite. So.” He darts a glance up at Liam before returning it to the floor, arms still tucked around him. “I’m telling you that still have to eat, like. You’re not being given a choice.”

Liam observes the pout of Zayn’s lips, like the boy is preparing for a fight on this. Like this is a normal night, where they kiss dry comments off each other’s lips.

Like Zayn’s belated Christmas present to the detective wasn’t the body of a twelve-year-old.

“You’re such a fucking geek,” is what Liam says, words sticking oddly. He hopes it reads as strain from an impossible day.

“Yeah, well, you need to make sure you’re staying fed,” Zayn snaps. “Do you want the sweet and sour or the ginger chicken?”

The detective swallows. God, he’s going to mourn for this. The person he thought he knew. The life he thought he might have been building.

They barely touch during dinner. It’s strange—Liam has sat at interrogation tables opposite murderers and rapists, but he’s never held such sickness in his heart from a simple look into their eyes.

But then, he’s never wanted to beg them to prove their innocence, either, kneeling in tearful supplication.

He passes Zayn the container of soup and nearly says _Tell me why you did it._

He hands him a set of chopsticks and almost asks _Why did you choose me?_

When Zayn tells him he needs to drink enough water to make sure he’s not going to prolong the stress reaction, Liam is halfway to asking the boy if he truly still thinks he’s fooling anyone with the shows of concern.

He wants to ask, _Aren’t you tired of pretending?_

The food does, however, make him feel a bit better. He’d been running on empty since long before they recovered the boy’s body.

Liam watches Zayn navigate the fried rice for a bite of tofu and allows himself a moment to imagine it’s as simple as this, nightmare days ending with a boy who takes care of him.

The image shatters when he allows himself to acknowledge _why_ his days are nightmares, why actual sleep has evaded him for so long.

Zayn is the beginning and end of all hells.

Bed is a nearly inconceivable notion. There’s sleeping with monsters out of ignorance and then there’s _this,_ laying beside them with a mind turned nuclear.

“I’ll be in in a little bit,” Liam murmurs from the doorway, watching Zayn curl into the sheets. The detective’s stomach clenches as he leans in, pressing his mouth to the familiar fullness of Zayn’s. Hopes the perfunctory motion doesn’t set off any alarms for the boy.

Hopes, also, that it does.

Because the morning will find him reporting evidence that proves within inches of certainty that Zayn Malik is the serial killer haunting the wide avenues and narrow alleys of London. There will be momentary chaos and then brutal efficiency, handcuffs and a holding cell, debriefings and press conferences and many, many more nights where Liam will not find sleep.

It’s—it’s what has to happen. It’s what’s just. There’s no room for renegotiating the facts of it, reordering events until there’s room for argument and blame placed elsewhere.

It’s what’s right.

He zones out in the living room to infomercials until his eyelids are gritty and weighted as cinderblocks, then pads as lightly into the bedroom as he can manage.

Zayn lays there, harmless as he’ll ever be between dark cotton sheets. Fully vulnerable, sleep-slackened features and the tender line of his throat.

Liam lays gently beside him, skin crawling with unease. He stares. Whispers the words across the darkness while Zayn slumbers.

“Run while you can.”

Zayn is a monster, all through him and down to the chambers of his errant heart.

Liam is sure of it. Despairingly so.

He just doesn’t know what that makes him.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“There—there were two more incidents,” the detective manages. “In Leeds. Zayn would have been—”_   
> 
> 
> _“Sixteen,” she finishes. Her tone drops to something morbid. “We just call it The Bad Year.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! How'd chapter eight treat ya? You doing...alright? Happy 2016, by the way.
> 
> Thank you to Monica, Melissa, Mason, and all the rest of you I've had the chance to chat with this week and since this whole process began. Truly you are the wind beneath my wings. My murder wings. 
> 
> Find my on tumblr at protagonist-m.

Quiet and quiet and quiet.

No boots by the door. No bag on the couch. No lingering warmth on Zayn’s side of the bed.

For a moment, Liam stands over it. He imagines the careful steps the boy must have taken as he lets himself sink down onto the mattress. Curls into himself and he presses his face to the pillow. Closes his eyes. Breathes in.

Lavender and laundry powder and leather, even here. Even in their bed.

He casts a reluctant gaze to the equally reluctant sky, lightening into bleak morning on the other side of the window.

_Run while you can._ Of course Zayn would make his survival instinct known at the eleventh hour.

Of course he would.

He took all the oxygen from the flat with him, though, wherever he went. That was a bit selfish. Liam gets dressed and it’s silent. The atmosphere is still and linen white, willing him not to move through it. Not to make this a reality he can’t escape.

He has to, he knows. It’s that simple.

There’s a moment when Liam’s on the pavement outside his flat that he swears he feels eyes, feels the weight of a dark, familiar stare pressing into him.

It’s nothing, though. It’s no one. His vision catches on a sliver of blue piercing the gray of the sky, the way gold morning light rounds its edges, blistering and sure. He feels his body ache for something he hasn’t named.

He’s scared to.

The dense inner silence follows Liam to the Yard, down its halls and into the investigation’s office. The detective offers a weak smile to his team and sits at his desk. It’s time, now, to seriously consider just how to go about this.

Exposing Zayn for what he is. Bringing to light what he knows.

Breaking his own heart, essentially.

The jump drive is in Liam’s pocket, hard-edged and implicating. He pulls it out and rests it in the center of his desk. Stares at it.

Winston will be in within the hour. Liam should go straight to him, explain what he’s found—the schedule inconsistencies, the missing alibis, the _lies_ —and have a warrant put out for the arrest of Zayn Malik. Should slide the jump drive across his desk and offer his full compliance.

He’ll have to testify. Absolutely. Named in every note, heading the investigation, _romantically involved with the killer,_ of course he’ll be made to testify. Sit up on the witness stand and tell them how the boy used his cut-glass loveliness and impossible charm to stand right at the investigation’s core. How he twisted his way into the lives of the team, big grins and immaculate knowledge and everything they were taught to love. Beautiful, beautiful.

That’s another issue. The entire team is complicit in allowing a civilian access to the case. Liam has two options: get the lot of them fired for the admission, or claim full responsibility. Say that the rest of the team had no awareness that Zayn knew the details of the case, that he broke into the records without the knowledge of anyone but Liam.

That charge alone would be enough to put Zayn in a cell. Liam wonders if he had it wrong this whole time, if Zayn is actually something of a complete moron. Almost as careless with the detective as the detective is with him.

Was with him.

So there’s some deliberation to be done, stories he needs to get straight.

He still has to tell Winston what he knows. Soon.

That alone is going to be a nearly impossible moment. An admission of error and wrongdoing and _failure_ to do that which he was entrusted to. An admittance that he was unable to put this case first when it counted, when its solution was staring him dead in the eye with a smoky, unrepentant gaze.

Tomlinson had been right. He’d questioned and doubted and seen what Liam was too dizzy with fascination and lust and—and something deeper, more insidious, to process.

He’d tried to warn the detective.

Another issue to address. An apology that’ll need to be made, if the man will even accept it. Liam glances up to where Tomlinson sits on the edge of Horan’s desk, chatting with him in low tones, and thinks back on his own behavior over these last months. The dismissal and coldness and how easily he let go of his best mate.

Probably, he doesn’t deserve to be back in Louis’ good graces. Doesn’t deserve the extension of a trust he so readily betrayed for—what?

Just a set of darkly honeyed lies. Just something as appalling as it was beautiful. Smoke and mirrors.

And blood. Fair deal of that, too.

It’s worth a shot, though. Worth at least _attempting_ to recover that connection, as well as all the other things Liam’s neglected while lost in the act of falling for Zayn.

He stares back down at the jump drive while the previous months pour through his mind in hazy, dark vignettes. Zayn hovering over him, lips and teeth on Liam’s throat. Zayn in boxers and one of Liam’s oldest, rattiest tees, settling into his side on lazy Saturday mornings. Zayn in cafés and book stores and the passenger seat of Liam’s car, always enthralling in a way that punishes. Zayn with his shoes on Liam’s desk,  bored gaze and polished speech and solving whatever they throw at him. Zayn and his wide eyes and piercing words and cruel art and soft mouth.

There was never any room for the case, among all that. Liam never did stand a chance.

The detective pulls himself from his chair, hurting all over. He moves across the room to fill a mug with coffee, not looking into the depth of it for fear of what other dark and bitter things might be brought to mind.

Horan trundles up while he’s blowing on the mug, whistling something lively. “Payno.”

“Nialler,” Liam returns on autopilot.

The whistling cuts out. “You alright?” Niall asks in an undertone, bright eyes radiating concern.

Liam thinks about the last few months. The next few. He bites at his lip, a newer habit. “Fancy a smoke?”

The man’s eyes darken; they’re all so close here, he could probably narrow down the precise week he last saw Liam put a cigarette to his mouth.

Since he replaced one addiction with another.

He doesn’t comment, though, simply nods and walks with Liam out through the door and to the back lot.

Liam is a third of the way through his cigarette when he breathes out a lungful of smoke with the words, “I think I might have a lead. On the case.”

Too much gravity for such a simple statement. Niall picks up on it. “What kind of lead?” he asks, tone giving away that he already knows.

“I think,” Liam begins, dragging in another lungful of ash, “I know who our killer is.”

An exhale that holds the ghost of a laugh, disbelieving. “So suddenly?”

It’s a good question, a sharp one. Liam pushes his hands into his coat pockets, letting the cigarette hang from his lips. He turns his head to look at Niall, quiet and inquisitive. Solid.

“Not all that sudden,” he answers. “He’s—tricky. Needed to be handled carefully.”

Niall’s a fast smoker, sharp inhales and quick puffs out. “You telling Winston?”

“I have to tell everyone,” Liam says. “But yeah, gonna—start with Winston.”

The man nods. “That what’s on the little flash drive you were trying to melt with your eyes for twenty minutes, then?” he tries, tone light.

Liam smiles as much as he can manage. It’s not much. “You figure that might make this whole nightmare disappear?”

Horan shakes his head. He scratches up near the collar of his shirt as he takes Liam in. The aura of certain ruin that hangs around him. “You don’t really want that.”

Maybe not, but. “I kind of do,” Liam admits. Niall doesn’t flinch, and he’s grateful. “He was—it’s just weird. To be so wrong about somebody.”

“Yeah,” Niall says, taking a last inhale from the stub of his fag. “But this is better,” he assures him, weighty tone and somber eyes. Liam opens his mouth to argue, and the man continues, “I know you don’t believe me when I say that, but Liam—you’re saving people.” He drops the cigarette, letting the smoking nub disintegrate in a puddle off to the side of the stoop and its low overhang. “That’s the whole point of it. Of what we do. Y’know?”

Liam drops his own cigarette unfinished. “You’re a better man than I am,” he mutters.

“There aren’t better men than you.”

Liam looks up from where he was watching some persistent plant take in moisture at a crack between cement and asphalt and watches Niall flush, just a little, sentimental outbursts not his forte.

The detective doesn’t want to draw attention to it, make the last person he feels at ease with uncomfortable, so he shrugs it away. “But you’re one of them,” he asserts.

Niall shrugs, fidgety until Liam claps him on the back and they head back in.

When they return to the office, Niall squeezes his shoulder like he’s saying _good luck_ before he goes back to his own projects and to Kloss. Waiting at the man’s desk, she’s poised to ask a question before the blond has even sat down.

And now, fingers jittery with nicotine, there’s nothing to distract Liam from putting together the report he wants to present to Winston. Save for his desire not to.

He breathes in and pushes past it. There’s not another option.

The main case file for the investigation exists in both physical and digital copies, all locked up tight. Liam enters his login info and inserts the flash drive. Scans the digital file, picking out the points that hold significance to add to his report.

The dates and times. The method. The profiling report. Liam’s role.

He supposes Winston will be gratified to learn he was right. Liam’s presence drew out the killer.

Something treacherous in the detective crackles as he peruses the document, whispering hope that Zayn had the sense to leave London. Hide out with one of his old mates, maybe, those lads in the arson gang. Leave no record of his travels.

Disappear and never, ever let himself be found.

The more Liam thinks on it, the more he wants it. A last dead end. If anyone could pull it off, it would be the same boy who found a way to kill while bedding the commanding detective of the investigation. Practically living in his pocket.

There’s a ghost of sensation, the precise timbre of Zayn’s laugh in Liam’s ear. He hums a few bars of something until it fades away again and he can focus on something other than the splinters lodging themselves in his windpipe, his chest.

When he gets to the report on Zayn’s interview with Winston following the note naming him—clever diversion, that—Liam scans it for anything the boy may have given away at the time. Some callous remark, some cocky assertion when he was in the thick of it and miraculously still above suspicion.

Liam looks, gaze feeling dull even as it traces each word with intense care.

He looks, and then freezes.

Someone must have added it later, some circumspect administrative assistant over in records, because Liam has no memory— _no memory—_ of the heading reading as anything but the standard date and subject and interviewing officer.

There was never any mention of a name change before.

_Zayn Javadd Malik (form. Zain Javadd Malik)._ Liam reads it over once and then again.

Sound dulls around him. His fingers are shocky and clumsy as he opens the records lookup, types in the former name and filters for exact matches.

One is found in the system. Liam selects it with jittery clicks.

The earliest record under the old name is from more than a decade ago. _Calderdale,_ it gives as location of offense. The offense itself reads _unlisted._

It would have been sealed after the boy turned eighteen, Liam realizes. It could be anything, any small run-in, any minor citation.

Still, Zayn would have been _nine_ when he logged his first offense. Liam’s mind races as he thinks of what it possibly could have been, to have someone ticketing a child.

The next is from not quite a year after that, also in Calderdale. Three follow in the next four years, all from Wakefield, all sealed. Two more in Leeds. Zayn would have been not quite seventeen for those.

For how little info it offers, it’s a harrowing list. Eight offenses in a decade, so many of which would have been when the boy was still prepubescent and baby-faced.

Younger than his last victim.

And Liam has no way to find out what they were, unless he wants to make a call to records, get them to round up information from every borough in West Yorkshire. It could take days that this investigation doesn’t have—days in which Liam would fake his way through breathing, less and less convincing with each exhale. It would put Zayn on their radar in a way he couldn’t take back.

He just needs a little more time.

It occurs to the detective after a long, frantic moment. Liam flips over to the web browser, pulling up Google and typing in the former full name.

The first few results are social media accounts attached to pictures that are clearly not Zayn. It’s relieving, in its way, not having to see Zayn’s name—his former name—placed next to coverage of a hearing.

There’s nothing at all, actually. Liam breathes clear, tightness in his chest from the cigarette alone, and is about to exit when it catches his eye near the bottom of the second page.

A link to a class webpage for a grade school. Liam frowns, following the thrum of instinct and clicking it.

_MS. LITTLER’S YEAR TWO,_ the garish header proclaims. The whole thing, Liam notes, is a bit of a design nightmare in the way old, amateur websites tend to be. Unbidden, he thinks of what Zayn’s reaction would look like. How his features would twist in nearly comic distress, offended beyond reason by the sin of poor design.

He shakes the thought off. Refuses to fixate.

Under the title is a short description, exuberant as it explains the purpose of the webpage and that Ms. Littler hopes they can all have a good year.

Under that is a picture.

There’s about two dozen kids, all sitting on or near an adult—parents, Liam reckons, given the eerie similarities between some of them.

Zayn—Zain—is easy to spot. He’s chubby-cheeked with ears that stick out just a bit, eyes wide and seemingly darker than they show now. He’s tucked under the arm of a woman to his left. She’s got a wide, sweet smile. The same absurd lashes as the boy beside her.

His mum.

Liam allows himself another minute to stare at this oddly foreign, oddly familiar boy, then scrolls further down the page.

Ms. Littler, bless her, took the time to list everyone pictured.

_Zain Malik,_ Liam reads. _Trisha Malik._

Trisha Malik. He opens a new tab to find some sort of record of number or address. Clicks back to the class page a moment later.

Zain isn’t smiling in the photo. While the other kids are showing off their uneven, jack o’lantern grins or else smiling shyly in the embrace of their parent, Zain is simply staring into the camera.

It’s a ringer for that stunningly dead look Zayn gave Liam last night in the kitchen, when they said everything but what they were thinking. Blanker than bored. More sinister for it.

Zayn would have been seven when this photo was taken.

His mother’s smile seems so genuine, crinkles by her eyes a match for when Zayn pulls out the same expression. He hadn’t, though, not for this class photo, not with his mum leaning her head slightly on top of his in a way that’s so maternal Liam nearly wants to cry seeing the contrast.

What business does a seven-year-old have looking that _dead_ inside?

Liam flips back to the other tab. There’s someone who knows.

It takes less than five minutes to find an address. About as long to look at the jump drive holding the evidence against Zayn and decide that the case will only benefit from additional information.

Personal curiosity aside.

He’s not going to kill someone new today, Liam thinks bitterly. The boy’s already destroyed a family this week.

The detective locks the USB in the top drawer of his desk, tugging on the handle to make sure it’s fastened before pocketing the keys and standing with only a tenth of the urgency he feels. He makes his way to the door with steps forced into nonchalance.

“You heading upstairs?” Cabello asks, looking up from her desk as he passes. “Will you grab me a chocolate milk from the machine?”

“Actually have some field work,” Liam explains, wincing an apology. “Text me if anything happens.”

“Alright,” Cabello says. She frowns a little. “You should still bring me a milk.”

“It’s gonna be a while.”

“Still.”

“I will if I remember,” Liam offers as he strides into the hall, hand curling around the keys in his pocket.

He’s got a long drive ahead.

 

Late afternoon is inching toward evening by the time Liam pulls up in front of the house.

White door. Brown brick. Could be anyone’s family home, lacey curtains and a pink lamp on the sill of an upstairs window.

Liam knocks.

A muffled _one minute_ comes from behind the door, followed by the sound of feet clomping down from the second level.

The door swings in. Liam is briefly winded.

She can’t be much older than thirteen, staring up at Liam with a vague curiosity and massive, familiar eyes.

She looks so much like Zayn that it burns.

“May I help you?” she asks, self-possessed where she stands in the doorway. Her syllables roll like Zayn’s, too, folded under on the ends with that same accent.

“My name’s Liam,” the detective begins. A shrill of reprimand runs through his mind as he remembers that this isn’t a social call. He’s not been invited around for roast.

This isn’t him meeting Zayn’s family. It’s him doing his job.

“Uh, Detective Inspector Liam Payne, actually,” he starts again. He clears his throat. “I’m here to speak to Trisha.”

The girl’s face holds what might be a hint of comprehension. “Mum,” she calls back into the house, eyes wary on Liam. “There’s someone at the door for you.”

A warm voice from a room away. “Well who is it, love.”

“It’s—” the girl’s face flushes a little. Liam thinks he recognizes it, the look of someone caught in the middle of something they don’t fully understand but absolutely dread. “It’s the police, mum.”

Liam catches a swear muttered under the woman’s breath before she’s shuffling into the entryway. Trisha still looks so much like the picture from over a decade previous--same wide mouth and dark eyes--and she takes her daughter’s place as the girl skitters away, glad for the reprieve.

The first words out of her mouth, tenor kinder than Liam would have expected, are “What’s he done now?”

The detective opens his mouth to explain.

It’s a matter of a few minutes before Trisha has them set up in the kitchen, telling the girl—Waliyha, she’d called her—to go do homework upstairs.

The girl says something in Urdu that has Trisha rolling her eyes and shooing her away before pouring hot water into a mug the color of a robin’s egg.

“You didn’t need to drive all the way up here from London,” Trisha tells him, “I’d’ve been happy to talk to you on the phone, make your job a bit easier.”

“No, it’s—it’s fine.” Liam takes the mug in his hands and thanks her softly, blowing on the steam as he casts a quick glance around the warm little kitchen in the afternoon light. “I hope it’s not an inconvenience, me being here.”

She’s already shaking her head. “You’re just fine, love.” Trisha settles her own mug on the pale wood table, rests her forearms on either side of it. Leaning in toward Liam just a bit. “Now, what can I help you with?”

Liam wonders if the woman’s easy compliance with the law comes from experience or is simply some aspect of who she is, gentle and kind in a way that comes naturally. “Your son—uh, Zayn, rather—has been implicated in an ongoing investigation. I’m hoping to learn more about his background and any…any history of violence that he may have.”

Trisha looks—the detective would characterize it as _mournful,_ almost, but he wouldn’t call it surprised. She lets out a short sigh, resigned. “Right. What do you already know? You have his record, I expect.”

“I do,” Liam says, solemn, “but—you probably know this—anything from before his eighteenth birthday is sealed. I _can_ access it,” he clarifies as confusion slants Trisha’s brow, “but Zayn is—your son is somewhat outside of what we usually see. He’s.” Brilliant. Magnetic. Deceptive. Liam’s, once.

“An outlier,” Trisha supplies softly. She’s cradling her head in her palm, taking in Liam with soft eyes.

Liam nods, mouth dry. “Yes. I figured the raw, uh, reports wouldn’t tell the full story.”

The woman lets out a dry little laugh. The edges are tinged with a violet sadness. “They wouldn’t, no. I expect not.”

“Can you?” Liam asks. He takes a sip of his tea. “Tell me, I mean. The full story.”

Zayn’s mum nods, gaze on the table for a moment, on her own hands, before it rises to meet Liam’s. “The thing to understand about my son is that he’s not put together the same as the rest of us. It’s not bad,” she rushes to add, hand rising in emphasis, “it’s just different.” Large, insistent eyes. “I made sure to always, _always_ tell him that.”

Liam settles into his chair and listens to the soft cadence of Trisha’s speech, the thoughtful flow of it.

“When he was born, we thought—his dad and I—that he might have a problem. I mean,” she waves a hand near her temple, “a developmental problem. Doniya—his older sister—had been such a sweet, goofy baby, but Zayn was just.” The woman shakes her head once. “So serious. He wouldn’t laugh or smile or coo when I played with him, wouldn’t—wouldn’t cry for me unless he was hungry or needed a fresh nappy. He treated me like I was a stranger _,_ and he couldn’t even talk yet.

“Uh, but the doctors said, no, no, he’s developing fine, he’s learning just fine, so we figured, _maybe he’s just not a cuddler._ You know? Some babies aren’t.” The woman takes another sip from her mug, leaning forward a bit and eyeing Liam’s cup to see if he might need a refill.  “We loved him anyway. He was our baby boy.

“He never wanted anything to do with his sisters. Not Don, and not Waliyha when she came along. They’d try and play with him and he’d push them away until they stopped. They’d touch his toys and he’d scream and scream and scream.” Trisha shakes her head, the ghost of some long-ago headache Liam has seen on his own mum’s face haunting her expression. “Then he started school. He was such a bright little boy, we figured he’d be a smash. The—structure, of the socialization. It would help, we thought.”

A hearty huff of air, not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh. The woman continues. “We started getting calls, a couple times a week. ‘Oh, your son’s been in a fight with another boy,’ ‘Oh, your son poured all his milk into the fish tank and now you owe us a new frog.’ We’d talk to him about it, Yaser and I both, y’know, _what made you want to do that, why did you think hitting them was okay,_ and he’d.” Trisha’s gaze flickers up from the table, meeting Liam’s rapt expression again. “He’d tell us, ‘That boy is very dumb, mum,’ or ‘I didn’t want to look at the frog anymore, dad,’ and it was...” Her dark eyes are distant for a moment before she reestablishes eye contact to ask, “Have you ever had a four-year-old give you the chills, Liam?”

“Can’t say I have,” Liam replies with a corroded throat.

Trisha nods. This was the answer she expected, clearly. “We started looking for counselors, you know, someone who could crack into that sweet little head of his,” she continues. “Went through three or four in the first couple years. None of them stuck.”

“Couldn’t crack him?” Liam wonders, imagining Zayn tiny and petulant, staring miniature daggers with his feet not quite touching the ground from his seat in a psychologist’s office.

Trisha shakes her head. “He _played_ them.”

Liam frowns. “Played them.”

“They’d give us these fantastic reports three or so weeks in, go on about progress and Zayn really opening up to them, and—” she shrugs. “It was always some made up story of his. Pretended to be scared of things like his classmates or certain types of weather, to just _really need his mummy’s love._ ” She snorts. “Meanwhile, I’m trying to cuddle the boy at home and he’s clawing at me to let him go.” Trisha offers a small, wry smile, eyes twinkling. “So we gave up on that for a bit.”

The detective heaves a breath in. “His first offense is from when he was nine,” he prompts.

Any amusement drains from Trisha’s warm features. “He set a bookshelf on fire. In his classroom in year three, he took a match and just—stood there.”

Arson. Liam had called Zayn _ambitious_ the first night he’d driven him home. “And the one after that?”

Trisha is verging on gray, now. Briefly, silently, Liam wishes there was a way to make this someone else’s life, make it not belong to the woman in front of him. “He—there was this dog that used to…well. It lived a house down from us, back in Calderdale. Nervous little thing. Nippy.” She stares into nothing, bewildered even now. “Didn’t deserve what he did to it, though.”

Liam isn’t  sure he’s ever felt this cold. He thinks of Loki. “What—?”

“Poison,” she says quickly, eyes back on Liam’s. “Fed it antifreeze, the poor—the family it belonged to pressed charges. Zayn, he never even _tried_ to hide what he’d done. Told his classmates, I expect. Other mums would ask me about it in the store. Whisper about it at teacher conference nights.” 

There’s something glittering and tragic in Trisha’s gaze, a glimpse of the isolation Liam can only imagine from when Zayn was small. More open about his proclivities.

“Is that why you moved to Wakefield?” he asks as gently as he can manage.

She bites her lip and nods. “We needed a fresh go. All of us. _I_ certainly did.” She says it on a laugh that strangles itself into nonexistence. “We started looking for counselors again. Same result.”

“And more offenses,” Liam notes.

“More of the same,” the woman admits. A touch quieter than the rest, “I always—I’d keep myself up at night worrying he’d do something to one of his sisters. The bigger girls sort of—kept their distance, y’know. Knew better. Worried Safaa might set something off in him, though.”

Sickness pooling in his gut, Liam asks, “Did he ever hurt one of his sisters?”

“That—” Trisha stops, lips pursed. “That’s what was always weird with my son. Especially weird. He never did a thing to any of us. Not our cat, not Don’s hamster.” She quirks the detective a sly look. “She managed that one on her own, sweet daft thing. And he got—cleverer, I think, about hiding his…activities.”

Liam nods. He can imagine.

“He was such a—such a _cold_ boy, but so smart,” Trisha says. “Loved the sciences, as much as he could enjoy anything. So we,” she shrugs, “set him up at science camps during the summer hols, bought him any book you could imagine on the body and the brain. Thought it might help.” She sounds a touch proud, still, when she adds, “He devoured them _all._ ”

It’s a testament to how far gone Liam is that the image strikes him as sweet, troubled little Zayn curled up with an encyclopedia of physiology or an introduction to neuroscience. So similar to the boy now, intense focus on the discipline he’s devoted a lifetime to.

“Do you think…” Liam pauses. Weighs whether it’s even worth asking of a mother. If it could ever be worth it, to pick at such a wound.

But Trisha is kind and bright and so terribly candid, head leaned toward the detective like he’s a confidant, and it occurs to him she may have never had this before. Someone to talk to about the beautiful, broken boy she raised. Certainly she never found it with other mothers. Her husband and daughters had their own tinted views.

So he risks it and asks. “Do you think he loved you? His family?”

The woman before him doesn’t dissolve into tears or throw her mug across the room, doesn’t leap to her feet and demand Liam leave her home. She just smiles, small and a little sad. “Well. Wakefield was where we got the psychologist—the last psychologist, actually, until—well. Anyway. Zayn was thirteen or nearly thirteen, and this man he’d been seeing twice a week calls me after one of Zayn’s sessions, right, and tells me—” She squints at Liam. “Do you have any familiarity with callous-unemotional trait children, Inspector?”

Liam puts the words together for himself, tries to parse meaning from individual definition. “I apologize, I’m afraid I don’t.”

Trisha waves a dismissive hand by her mug before wrapping her fingers around it. “It’s not terribly common, love, don’t worry.” She drains the last of the cup, setting it back down as she continues. “It’s a diagnosis given to children who exhibit a lack of guilt and empathy while maintaining—well, I think the man called it _‘shallow affect,’_ but, charm without sincerity, essentially.” She leans unconsciously forward to add, “It’s often a pre-diagnosis for Antisocial Personality Disorder.”

The detective stares at the grain of the table. “That’s—” he swallows against the itch in his throat. “That’s sociopathy, isn’t it?”

He sees Zayn’s mum nod once. “It is.”

_Admit you’re happy about it._

_I’m not._

Liam closes his eyes, memory after memory resurfacing and giving substance to Trisha’s words. Zayn with his wide smiles that slid so easily from his face, Zayn with his unapologetic frankness, Zayn with his mercurial attitude like roles in a play, slipping into whichever was needed in the moment.

Trisha must see something in the pained pinch of Liam’s mouth, because she rushes to add, “But we tried not to use that word in this household. We just called it ‘Zayn’s ASPD,’ even before the diagnosis. That was a few years off, still. It was—well, it wasn’t exactly shocking by then. It helped,” she adds thoughtfully, “to have a name to put to it. It wasn’t just Zayn being _cruel._ He had—has—a disorder.”

Something in Liam’s chest aches at the faith in her voice. The forgiveness. “Was there any treatment? If the therapy kept failing.”

“Of a sort,” Trisha says. “The problem is that, people with ASPD, they work only in service of their own interests.” Trisha shakes her head, rueful. “There’s no selflessness in them.”

There’s a disagreement in the back of Liam’s throat, images of Zayn letting him breathe into his neck after a bad day or kneeling down between Liam’s legs, fingers dragging down Liam’s thigh, mouth working over him without any regard for the way he’s tenting his own jeans.

Not things to share with the boy’s mother.  “What did that end up meaning for treatment?”

“He needed—I guess there’s not a lot of overlap between autism and ASPD,” Trisha explains. Liam is reminded of Zayn’s crisp tone when speaking of the brain and body. Wonders if this is where he learned it. “But there are similarities. The literature—scant, by the way, they still know fuck-all about it—” she adds in a conspiratorial undertone, “—suggests that teaching emotional literacy as early as possible…helps.”

Liam is fairly sure he understands. “Emotional literacy,” he prompts anyway.

“How to gauge why a person is reacting to you the way they are. What responses are considered healthy.”

The detective looks at Zayn’s mum, the downward tuck of her mouth at the corners, with something like understanding. “You taught him to blend in.”

“I taught him to _understand,_ ” Trisha says. “To feign understanding, at the very least. To function. He was my baby. He was cold and, and vulgar, and sometimes I even thought he was a bit scary, but I wasn’t going to abandon him when he needed me.”

Fierce conviction floods Trisha’s expression. Liam feels his neck flush with how badly he wants things to have turned out differently. For it to have worked, for this woman’s attempts to rehabilitate her child to have taken.

For him not to have stepped over the edge without any ability to turn back.

“So we taught him about empathy, and we made him practice correct responses, and I cuddled that child _ferociously,_ even when he screamed his head off at me for it,” she asserts. “We did—” an expansive hand motion, “— _everything_ we could think of, to lessen the effects of his disorder and the urges. To give him a shot at a normal life.”

Liam isn’t cruel. He doesn’t tell her that, best intentions aside, all they really managed was to make the boy better at hiding himself, at mimicking those around him so he could edge into their lives. Make himself indispensable to those he used.

Commit heinous acts and leave them still hopelessly addicted.

“There—there were two more incidents,” the detective manages. “In Leeds. Zayn would have been—”

“Sixteen,” Trisha finishes. Her tone drops to something morbid. “We just call it The Bad Year.”

“Why is that,” Liam asks quietly. He can’t imagine what could be worse than what he’s already heard.

The woman traces random patterns in the tabletop with her fingers, so much like her son in her thoughtful habits that Liam’s heart hurts. Briefly, there’s a clattering sound from the second floor that has her casting a gaze up before shaking her head and continuing. “Leeds was a mistake,” she says. “There was no way to know that at the time, but. Zayn found a new crowd there. A bit rougher.”

Liam thinks back to the boys in the shipping yard. “Do you remember any names?”

“There was…Ant, and Danny, and there was a Georgie in there.” Her nose wrinkles. “Some kid who called himself _Lunchmeat,_ as well.”

The detective nods. Ant. The boy who’d spoken up, spilled the details on who gave the arson gang the job with the boat. On Sam Hueffed.  

He knew Zayn during The Bad Year.

“What happened?” he asks, tentative despite the press of curiosity welling inside him.

It takes the woman a moment to consider her response. “What people tend to know about my son’s disorder is that those affected are…cold, and emotionless, and uncooperative.” She looks up to meet Liam’s eye, check to see if that holds with his reality. He nods, and she continues. “At the minimum, that’s what—what people think. What they _don’t_ know,” here her tone grows heavier, “is that it makes a person _impossibly_ self-destructive.”

Broken skin and scabbed knuckles and an early insistence that safe sex is trivial. “I can imagine,” Liam says.

“Zayn was getting older, and he—he’d grown into such a _handsome_ young man, which was worrisome enough. He was already so good at getting his way, didn’t need—well. But he’d come home at absurd hours, wouldn’t listen when we grounded him, didn’t—didn’t have _remorse_ for what it meant for us, when he was out until four in the morning with those _rats,_ cackling like hyenas and striking those matches like we didn’t know. Our son would come home smelling like—like cigarettes and liquor and other people, still out of his mind on who knew what.” There’s something thunderous in Trisha’s gaze that Liam can feel in his own. He tries to mute it, stay professional, even as he sympathizes with the woman in front of him more than she could possibly know. Even as he feels astringent disgust for anyone who would play on Zayn’s worst instincts. “He let it take over, and suddenly all this study he’d been doing with the university in Leeds, all the work he’d put in, it was like it didn’t _matter._ ”

“You must have been so worried,” Liam muses. It hadn’t been meant for her ears, not really. Not with how clearly he can feel vestiges of his own panic, nights when Zayn would show up to the station with raw-looking scrapes from being pressed into unforgiving brick walls or mornings he’d seem listless and distant-eyed, alarmingly out of it.

Trisha lets out a raw little noise, something wounded and aching and worn-in. “We were _terrified._ ” She shakes her head, darkly wondering. “And we were right to be, do you know?”

Liam waits as the woman visibly collects herself, already feeling bile in the back of his throat. It’s an effort to remind himself that Zayn is fine, now, regardless of what happened then.

He’s not someone Liam should still worry about, anyway.

“Zayn didn’t come home one night,” she finally says, words plinking out from between her lips like river pebbles. “Yaser would stay up with me, but he had work and I finally told him to just go to bed. Told him I’d wait.” Trisha’s brow scrunches, determined purse of her mouth as she fights the pull of memory. “It was just me awake when there was a call from hospital.”

Possibilities race through the detective’s mind, most tossed out the second he remembers every inch of smooth skin his mouth has traced. No scars. No burn marks. Just supple flesh and ink.

“He’d been found in an alley,” Trisha tells him. “Unconscious, _half-dead,_ they’d—those awful boys had left him there.”

It’s an image Liam knows well. Slumped bodies in alleyways, barely turning cold when the call comes in to the station and a team is dispatched for pickup. Gruesome and unextraordinary, lives extinguished in the ugly way society and circumstance conspire.

Zayn could have been one of them.

“Painkillers and cough medicine, they said.” Trisha’s face washes over with bafflement and anger and fear, even now. “Never did understand how a boy so intelligent could be—”

“So massively stupid,” Liam finishes, unthinking.

He regrets it immediately when he sees the appraisal in Trisha’s eyes, some flicker of knowing or nearly-knowing. She says nothing about it, though, just nods and continues. “They pumped our boy’s stomach and asked if we’d want to sign off on an appointed therapist in an in-patient treatment center. I remember, I laughed, because—we’d been down that road, hadn’t we? But there was, uh, there was a charge for— _petty theft,_ I can’t even believe—from earlier in the year, and they said it would help his case to be seen seeking treatment.” A shuddering exhale. “He spent two months there.”

The detective can’t stand to dwell on images of Zayn in a sterile little room, eyes burning with unspent hatred. Owning group therapy sessions the way he owns investigation teams with his charm and eloquence and dark fire. Absolutely lethal. Striking.

He pushes it along. “And the petty theft, that was his last charge?”

Trisha nods. “Well, that was when Caroline showed up.”

Liam’s pulse ticks up, erratic at the top of his throat. “Caroline.”

“His therapist at the treatment center.” There’s a tiny smile at the edge of the woman’s mouth. “My God, she’s something.”

“What can you tell me about her?” Liam thinks of Zayn looking suddenly sixteen in the vet’s office, the petulant curl to his mouth while Caroline looked at him with warm, serious eyes. Of course he’d seemed too young; this woman had been in his life since he was a teenager.

He supposes no one is quite immune from regression.

“Caroline Watson was—oh, she was a staffer at the place Zayn was staying at the time. She was assigned to him for one-on-one’s and…she just got it.” The woman shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know how that could be, but. My son doesn’t enjoy people, beyond what they can do for him, but she—she was different. Just, a sharp, sharp woman. Never tried to treat him like he could be ‘fixed.’ I think he may have respected that about her. Agreed to keep seeing her after he came home.”

“That’s good,” Liam says, meaning it. He’s losing track, a little, of which details are pertinent to the case and which are simply things he’s interested to know. It’s a bit addictive, even the grislier details, the way each piece of the story roots Zayn in something beyond the streets of London, where people disappear as easily as steam off sewer grates. “What differed, with her treatment of him? Do you know?”

A thoughtful noise. “He wouldn’t tell us, at first, but one day he said to me, we were sitting in the living room and he said, ‘She’s my moral compass, and she says I’m supposed to tell you more about our sessions and about me.’”

Liam’s brow crinkles. “Did you believe him?”

“Would you?” Trisha counters. “Not at first, no. He—he hadn’t exactly proven we could, had he. But Zayn…” The detective watches warmth bloom on the woman’s face, feels it resonate in his sternum. “He got it…sorted. As much as it could be, I mean. We’d moved to Bradford, he—he finished out a Masters course on Neurology and then one on Biology. He never saw those boys again, I’m nearly certain.”

Liam doesn’t correct her, hiding the flash of guilt for his role in reintroducing Zayn to his past influences in a sip from his mug.

“Yaser would drive him to see Caroline on Saturdays, I’d drive him on Wednesdays,” Trisha continues. “We were ecstatic when her husband relocated them to London a few months before Zayn headed down there for his doctoral programs. He was—he’d _improved.”_

Liam smiles. He realizes he’s mirroring Trisha’s posture, head on his hand, elbow on the table. “You sound surprised.”

“It’s not curable,” she tells him. “It’s—at in-patient they got him on an antipsychotic and something generally for OCD, as a supplement to that, and that helped with his ability to control his impulses, but the ASPD itself can’t be cured. Caroline swears that if he works at it, if he stays level, it might _abate,_ but—”

Something painful sticks in Liam’s throat. He knows how the story ends, even if Trisha doesn’t. Not yet.

“You did an amazing job,” he blurts out. He’s surprised at the insistence of his tone, how sincerity stains the words goldenrod. “All of you. The therapy, the emotional literacy, not—” He can’t, suddenly, hold the woman’s warm stare. He watches his fingers curl in toward his palm on the table instead. “Not giving up on him. That’s. Not everyone could have done that.”

“He’s ours, Inspector,” Trisha says again. “We only did what we could.” Quieter, “Of course we did.”

There’s a moment where they’re quiet, Liam appreciating anew how many different forms strength can take and Trisha examining him with a look he can’t quite interpret.

“You’ve met my son, haven’t you?” she says. There’s no judgment to it, no defensiveness.

“I have,” Liam admits, tone reeking of familiarity he’s growing too exhausted to fight.

Late afternoon sunlight is cutting through stark clouds, through the clean window and onto the table. It reflects back onto Trisha’s face, catches in those familiar eyes.

Liam shuffles in his chair. “If he shows up here, if you could call me…” He pulls a scrap of paper from the rucksack he’d propped against the table leg and scribbles his personal number. “I—I can’t give you a lot of details on our investigation, but when it starts to come into clearer focus, I’ll—it’ll be me who contacts you.” Uncertainty squeezes gently at his lungs. “If that’s alright?”

“Of course, pet,” Trisha says, warm and immediate. She walks him to the door, hand on his elbow. “Drive safe heading back.”

Liam nods easily. “Thank you for letting me in. For taking the time.”

“Not a topic I get asked about much,” she tells him, confirming his suspicion. “The girls have had a pretty normal go of it here, we try not to bring it up around other people.” She winces. “Sounds a bit bad, when I put it like that, doesn’t it.”

“Not everyone would understand,” Liam says with a shrug. “I do.”

“You do,” she repeats, and there’s something in her expression that makes Liam’s ears pink. He thanks her again and takes off into the rapidly falling evening, climbing into the car.

He’s pulling onto the road to start the long trip home when he sees the curtain of an upstairs window shift, a small face peeking out next to the little pink lamp. Liam offers a weak smile aimed upward. He’s unsurprised when the girl darts away.

The radio proves impossible to listen to, just more noise under the rush of thoughts while the detective navigates back through the borough.

Zayn is a sociopath—has _Antisocial Personality Disorder,_ rather—and that. That strings it together, doesn’t it? All that glowing attraction, magnetic from the very first. It was an _act._ Artifice in the name of getting closer and closer to the person at the head of the investigation. Prime viewing as they, in turn, got closer and closer to him.

Liam’s hands squeeze on the wheel and he wonders how often Zayn sat with him, flipping through files and quizzing him on what they knew, what they assumed, eyes shining that gaslight mirth at how hard they were struggling.

It sends stabs of hurt through the man as he comprehends all the things he was blind enough to trust. All the people he’s consequently failed.

The day gets dark until Liam can only see the road in front of him. Little engine sounds synch to his pulse as he winds back toward London, agony buried centimeters deep under his skin.

Perhaps it’s treacherous, but there’s something immensely painful to the notion that Zayn— _suffered,_ didn’t he, stewed in the hell of his own impulses for years before finding a way to control them. Immense pressure on Liam’s chest as he thinks of it, the tortured child who in turn went on to torture. Drugs and flame and always so much needless danger, so much meaningless violence. A symptom and a self-fulfilling prophecy, both.

Zayn had suffered—had _caused_ suffering—long before he fixated on Liam. The detective can’t help but think such a realization should bring relief.  

Anyone else, it would bring relief.

He doesn’t eye the crash rail to his left. Doesn’t give himself the mental freedom to feel bitter temptation.

_Big eyes, pretty smile, get what you want, is that how you put it? Seems to work well enough, don’t you think?_

If it could only be his _pride_ taking the hit. Just his heart, mangled and too useless for even its most basic tasks, hanging limply from stringy connecting tissue between his lungs. If there weren’t eleven people gone cold because Liam couldn’t put it together faster.

The detective finds himself wishing it was a hurt he could contain, keep inside himself. Just watch himself rot from the sheer enormity of the betrayal, eyes a little emptier every day.

A murder of one.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There’s a lot you can do to ruin a person short of killing them._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Moni and Melly for help with this chapter. Thank you to all of you for reading and leaving me such awesome messages here and on tumblr.
> 
> **Speaking of: please please please tag your spoilers on tumblr.** Thank you. 
> 
> Alright, that's all I got. Enjoy, lovelies.

The next day dawns cold beyond imagining.

Liam barely manages to flick on the hall light before stumbling through his morning routine, entire being throbbing with what he’s beginning to realize might just be grief. He needs a minute to get past the dull ache of it, some invisible wound originating from center mass.

He finds himself consciously monitoring his breathing, checking to make sure each inhale does what it should. No system appears to be fully functional, pulse sluggish, face pale. He does what he can. Careful exhales.

There was a dream buried in the cottony thick middle of the night that had him waking expecting to hear a voice—singing low and silky over the sound of the kettle being set up, mumbling nonsense to the dog while warm yellow light spilled in from the crack in the door—that would grant him permission to view the last days as a sequence in a nightmare.

Which part of the brain, Liam faintly wonders, is responsible for masochism?

They keep the vehicular evidence lockup cold, too. Best for preservation, but also a cheaper option, and Liam is just alive enough to be irritated by it as Pinnock leads him to the fishing boat’s burnt out shell.

“No touching without gloves,” she reminds him, slapping a pair into his palm, “no moving or altering evidence without one of the forensics team.”

“Only been here for seven years, Leigh,” he mumbles, sliding the blue latex over the hands he’s unwillingly pried from his pockets.

“Only takes one slipup, Inspector.” She raises an eyebrow, pointed, and strides away.

Liam doesn’t watch her go, just takes in the husk of a boat that not so long ago seemed their best lead.

_The Seablazer._ It’s still a little funny, even if nothing else is. Even if Liam still feels the echo of someone else’s warmth pressed against his side when he moves wrong, stumbles half out of reality and into sense memory.

There’s a hollowness to taking in the fishing boat’s shell, the blackened metal and dry, crumbled edges in the flat light of the massive storage room. Liam drinks it in, the unremarkable aftermath of conflagration.

He doesn’t feel close to him, here. He thought he might. So much ill will, so much carnage carried out on this boat. Liam thought he might be able to feel some vestige of vicious energy. Soak in the last of that scarlet intention.

Be with him again.

Inhale. Exhale. Liam pushes the thoughts away because he has to.

All the evidence implicating Zayn—it’s strong, but it’s not _enough._ Not for a court to convict, after the Hueffed lead was explored much more thoroughly. Not enough to confirm any more than what Liam should have gathered from the start: Zayn is damaged. Zayn is dangerous.

But lying isn’t illegal the way murder is. Knowing how to wield a scalpel doesn’t make you a monster. Bringing a horribly wounded animal to the vet doesn’t mean you’re the one who hurt it.

At the end of it all, it’s about finding justice for the ten families—husbands, wives, children, _parents—_ left grieving. They can’t let their killer walk free for lack of strong binding evidence.

So it’s with careful steps informed by urgency that Liam steps onto what remains of the boat, its barely-there deck and utterly ravaged cockpit. He descends the stepstool that’s been put in place of the destroyed stairs to the hull, careful not to lay too heavy a hand on the most charred panels.

When he’s fully down the stool, Liam clicks on a supplementary torch to peer into the darkest corners of the little shell. He crinkles his nose against the smell of burnt fiber and melted metal left lingering long after the flames.

What a shit day that had been. Liam examines what used to be the space for the bedroll and remembers the air tinged sharp with smoke, Niall’s eyes reflecting flames in the dying light. The fury, the frustration, the file—

The detective’s next breath hurts. The events are so thoroughly divorced in his mind, instigation and outcome completely separated by feeling, but that was. That.

It was the day he’d stormed into Zayn’s flat and lain bruises into his skin and kissed him and fucked him like maybe he only needed the one fix. Like maybe he could get it out of his system. Like it was ever purely physical.

Like he didn’t allow Zayn to invade every aspect of his life, work and sleep and each corner of his heart.

The boy’s rather good at playing with people’s insides, is the thing.

Speaking of. Liam casts a look around the dim space, the sooty walls and fragile charred beams left exposed overhead. Tries to decide where forensics has already thoroughly swept for evidence. What they could have possibly missed.

The answer comes from what remains of the floor. Fluorescent yellow tape marks off a rectangle in the narrow space allowed between the setup for the bed and the setup for a counter.

It’s where the bodies were strapped down for dissection, Liam remembers from the report, where they found a long table half-dissolved by ash and water when they recovered the boat. Free of prints or blood or anything of use, by then—likely kept clean by the roll of plastic sheeting found melted underneath it.

Liam skirts the tape carefully. He didn’t go into arson investigation for a reason, finds the chemistry of it tedious beyond words, but he can appreciate the work that goes into tracing scorch patterns, discerning irregularities from ash.

Or failing to. There was nothing returned to the team from arson of particular value beyond the accelerant likely used and the flashpoint, the mere fact that the table existed. No other evidence survived, Liam remembers, purged from the boat by the uniquely purifying quality of fire.

This is what he has to work with, though. He’s heard nothing from Zayn, can only assume he’s vanished the way Liam used to lay awake and fear that he might. While breaking into the boy’s flat isn’t out of the question, it would require movement through official channels.

Bleak and quiet inside his skull, Liam can admit he won’t be ready to formally implicate Zayn until he’s satisfied his own curiosity.

The shadows on the far wall of the boat’s crumbling interior move with the beam of his flashlight, dancing and eerie.

So much death on this vessel. If it weren’t Zayn carving lines into agonized flesh, it’d still be fishermen spilling piscine blood in air that smelled like death.

This boat is a home to violence in any life. Fitting, the detective thinks.

He’s not sure what he’s looking for, so caught in the miasma of his thoughts; he almost misses it.

 Cheap paneling charred black extends up from the floor where accelerant was poured. It’s dark enough, harsh enough that the eye doesn’t naturally excuse it and look beyond.

Beyond, though, are odd— _splatters,_ Liam would call them, obscured by ash and ruin but, now that he’s seen them, unmistakably there.

There’s only one thing they can possibly be. Why, then, are they completely untouched?

The morgue is as cold as the evidence lockup, but more starkly lit and smelling of chemicals. They press into Liam’s nose, have him rubbing it before he’s more than four paces into the space, already calling for the examiner.

There’s a swish of scrubs and then Styles pops out from behind an equipment shelf.

“Inspector,” he greets. His face betrays the slight apprehension that rests between them these days, eyes tightening at the corners, wide mouth twitching not to tug down.

Liam sighs only internally. Another bridge to repair, when he’s no longer viewing oxygen as an unaffordable commodity. “Styles.”

“What brings you down?” the man asks, gloved fingers light and proprietary on the gleaming edges of a microscope. Straight to the point, then.

“The arson report for the fishing boat,” Liam explains, itching his nose again. The tip is cold. “I don’t remember seeing anything about blood found on the interior.”

Harry’s eyes narrow while he thinks. “There...wasn’t. I mean, they didn’t bring me any to sample and ID, so.”

The detective considers that with his mouth turned slightly down. “You sure?”

Hazy irritation in pale eyes. “Liam.”

“Sorry, just. _I_ spotted it, can’t imagine arson didn’t.” Liam’s fingers twitch with the impulse to scratch at his nose again. “Gonna have them bring down some samples, okay?”

“Go right ahead, my morning’s clear so far.” Harry is absently fiddling with the dials on the microscope, gaze maybe a shade sharper than Liam is comfortable with as the detective sends a quick e-mail back to arson. “How’re you holding up?”

_Since the last body_ goes unspoken. Liam hears it anyway, weight on his eardrums like he’s far below the surface of a lake he doesn’t remember jumping into. “I’m dealing. We’re—that’s all we can do, with shit like that.”

Styles nods with a bit of a wince, phantom pain. It occurs to Liam that he had to stand there and look that little boy’s body over, jot down careful notes on what it was that took him from the earth. Recreate last moments.

“What about you?” he returns, gentler.

The man shrugs, lower lip sucked into his mouth, eyes a bit glassy. “Dealing. Same as you. Same as—Louis was a wreck.”

It’s blurted out like there was no intention of it, notion supported by the quick purse of Harry’s mouth.

Right. He would be the one picking up Louis’ pieces, these days. Liam certainly hasn’t been.

“I hope he’s doing better,” is what the detective says, and it’s not enough, not _I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for him_ or _I should have seen it sooner and I should have ended this ages ago_ or _Thank you for caring for my best mate while I was having my soul eaten away._ It’s only a fragment of the truth.

But it’s what he has right now.

The examiner shrugs one shoulder. “When it’s solved, it’ll help,” Harry tells him, like he’s been thinking about it and it’s truly that easy. Like these scars will be forgotten with the bang of a gavel and the turn of a cell’s lock.

“Yeah,” Liam offers, knowing better.

While they wait on the blood samples, Styles makes himself busy, large hands fiddling with a couple of beakers, eyes on anything but Liam.

And Liam wants to ask. He wants to see if Louis told the man what he suspected of Zayn, wants to know who all had it figured before the detective could even begin to cope with the reality.

Mostly, he wants to know if it might have gone differently if he’d trusted his colleagues. His friends.

Styles briefly excuses himself to his office with a murmured apology and Liam is left wondering still.

Instead of carefully pulled samples, Liam gets a phone call. It comes after what must be near to an hour spent in the morgue—long enough that the detective has to admit he’s avoiding the office, now, feeling more at home among the dead than with the people he’s let down so completely—and he answers after a long moment staring at the caller ID, flummoxed.

“We can’t get past the ash without risking the integrity of the stains,” Pinnock tells him over the line, frustration clear. “It’s—we had no awareness those were even _there_ until today.”

Liam rests an elbow on one of the morgue’s metal tables, kneads at his brow. His eyes squeeze shut for a moment. It’s weird, this. It raises a few questions. “Why wasn’t it checked until today?”

“Winston’ll know better than I,” Pinnock answers. “Look, we can’t even get a splatter analyst on it until we figure out how to remove the ash, so—”

“Can’t—can’t you just pull it up?” Liam tries. “Just remove that top layer?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me,” Pinnock answers. The detective imagines he can see the impatient set of the woman’s face. “Look, it’s easier said than done, yeah? Brushing won’t do it and scraping will do it _too_ well. Especially with the state the boat is in. We can’t risk compromising evidence before the case is even closed.”

“Latex,” Liam blurts.

“Pardon?”

“Liquid latex, I mean,” he corrects. “It’s—it’ll pick up your ash without disturbing the stains.” He stops. Considers. “I mean, I think? It’s—”

“No, you’ve…you’ve actually got a point,” Pinnock says, thoughtful. “Misting it, probably, wouldn’t want to paint it on.” Then, “Why do you _know_ that?”

“Do at least try and contain your disbelief,” Liam mutters, even if he gets it. “It was just a hunch, I don’t even know why I was—”

A room of broad canvas and a boy with crimson dripping from the brush in his hands to the bones of his knuckles. Rows of supplies, odd and seemingly inexplicable, fabric and paper and synthetic and gel.

“—thinking of it,” the detective finishes, quiet and bruised.

“Right, well. We’ll give it a go on a test section and see if it works, let you know.”

“Cheers, Leigh.” He hangs up, still feeling pressure around his eyeballs from the assault of memory.

“That’s clever,” Harry offers from where he’s reappeared across the chilly room.

Liam only shrugs, drowning for a moment.

The results of the test must be good, because Liam is pinged a series of photos detailing the freshly recovered stains—properly lit, this time, no shaky torch beams from detectives examining charred corners.

He eyes the door. The realities of this—of putting together an airtight case against Zayn—have always been apparent. Easy protocols.

It doesn’t make them welcome.

There’s perhaps some part of Styles that knows this, because he offers to print the photos, allows the intrusion into his macabre, sterile little lair.

He asks Liam if he wants tea.

They sit there together, looking over the photos with mugs that steam in the cold room. Liam hasn’t slept well for weeks now, can’t remember what day of the week it is without checking a calendar, but he can’t shake the feeling something’s—weird, about the splatters.

“Tell me what I’m missing,” he mumbles, to Harry or the photos or his own brain he can’t decide. “Tell me what I’m looking at and not seeing.”

He watches Harry chew on his lip in his peripheral, acute focus on the photographs they’ve spread on the long, brushed metal counter. “It’s a little weird,” he says slowly, “that there’d be a splatter at all.”

“We knew they were alive for the first incision,” Liam says, pads of his fingers rubbing at his cheekbone. “We knew that already.”

“Yeah, but.” Harry frowns harder, profile cutting sharp angles with how his hair is tied back. “If the killer was standing over them…we’d assumed off to the side, on the—on the left, because of how the incisions were made, but. There shouldn’t be blood on the left wall then, right? Of the boat’s cabin?” He looks up, eyes wide and seeking. It’s nearly endearing, Liam thinks, subject matter aside. “Or like—less. Because their body would have blocked it?”

Liam works it through in his head, patting at his pocket for a pen. Styles catches on, scooting a notepad from the corner of the counter.

“So if the body was situated like this…” Liam draws a rough little diagram, a rectangle and then a smaller rectangle and then a blob which might be generously described as a body, “…and he’d been standing like this…” another blob, more oval, situation on the left, “then. Huh.”

“Yeah,” Styles agrees, looking over the choppy diagram with keen eyes. “They—you know, I’d assumed…” He stands, moving to stand at the end of an empty gurney. His hands move in long, sweeping motions for a moment, like he’s fixing something in his mind. He mimes making an incision, first with one hand then the other.

“Styles,” Liam prompts, fidgety. “Use your words.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Harry shakes his head a bit. “I think I just figured something out.”

Better words than Liam’s head lately. “Share.”

“We’d assumed—it made sense, balance of probability and how the incisions were done, uh, as well as where someone with a similar degree of, like, _medical prowess_ to what the incisions suggested might approach it—we’d assumed they were right-handed.”

There’s a shiver of something in Liam’s stomach lining, abdomen tightening. “But now?”

“Well,” Harry is still staring at the empty gurney, seeing something else. “It’s—with the blood splatters, that couldn’t be. Or at least, they couldn’t have been standing off to the left. With how efficient the incisions were, they’d _have_ to be using their dominant hand, _have_ to be making the most efficient cuts possible.” He looks up, finally, making sure Liam is following. “So they’d be pulling the blade toward them, right. Or at least back into their dominant side.”

Liam takes a moment to mime it out for himself where he sits, pulling an invisible blade to the right then attempting to maneuver it leftward. “I see what you mean,” he concedes.

“So then, since we know where the incisions _started,_ ” Harry says, tone a clip faster than normal with excitement. Ding, Liam thinks dully. “We can conclude—the killer can’t be right-handed. They can’t. Not with these blood splatters versus those wounds.”

Liam imagines it, a faceless body strapped down and prone. “They did it from the other side?”

“Or the top,” the examiner qualifies. “It doesn’t—either way, they were using their left hand. Left-handed.”

His eyes glow green when he looks at Liam. The detective returns the gaze with a steadily increasing pulse, stomach still feeling tight and strange.

It narrows the field considerably, this. Something like only ten percent of the world is left-handed.

Zayn swore once it was a genetic mutation.

Zayn himself is right-handed.

Relief courses through Liam, endless and silvery, cleansing each festering crevice of his heart. “Oh my God,” he breathes, head dropping as his eyes slide shut.

It couldn’t have been Zayn. It couldn’t have been Zayn. It couldn’t have—

Something stoppers the reprieve from the detectives stagnant dread, though, some habit of second-guessing anything good.

He’ll wonder, later, when that became his response to good news. When he got so jaded.

For now, though, the questions keep popping up, macabre little daisies. What if Zayn was faking being dextral, one lie among many? What if he’s ambidextrous, clever enough to pull it off either way?

Why did he run, if he’s not guilty of something?

Because the detective’s been checking, and the boy wasn’t in class yesterday when Liam woke up to a cold bed and his own off-center gravity. He saw the accusation in Liam’s eyes, felt it in the flint of his voice. Took off.

Why?

The boy leaves nothing but questions in his wake, Liam thinks bitterly. Every damn time.

“Kind of a breakthrough, yeah,” Harry muses, oblivious to the hurricane rearranging Liam’s insides twice over. “Reckon that’s more helpful than the actual DNA in the blood, really.”

Liam nods slow agreement. Another glance at the photos has him chasing an older question around in his mind.

Pinnock said Winston would know why the splatters were never recovered.

It’s a rather massive question.

Liam gathers his things, rubbing at the chilly tops of his arms. “This is huge, Styles. You’re an asset.”

“’S my job,” Harry returns, dimple appearing anyway. “Go catch a killer, Inspector.”

“Plan to,” Liam tells him, even as he’s dizzy with the information that changes everything, “and. Louis, when he—” he breathes out. “When you send the findings up to the office, can you. Like. I need to talk to him,” he fumbles. “I. Owe him a lot of sorry’s, I’m realizing.”

His reward for clumsy honesty is a beaming grin splitting the examiner’s face. “I’ll let him know,” Harry says. Quieter, “He misses you. You know?”

Liam lets out an embarrassed little laugh. “I miss him too.”

It’s an understatement; Harry must get that, the way he nods.

Generally exiting the morgue is accompanied with a sensation of relief; Liam feels it _acutely_ on his walk to Winston’s office. There are still obstacles to anything approaching happiness, it’s true. Most of them hinge on the uncertainties that remain within the investigation. A few more hang on the heartbreak Liam is still wearing under his breastbone, all reluctantly toughened muscle.

But there’s progress away from what had felt for so long like an inevitable conclusion, and that’s more than the detective’s had in weeks.

Zayn might not have done it. Zayn is still a manipulative, damaged individual, still toyed with Liam’s heart and slithered into an investigation he had no place in, but there’s a chance now that it came from a place of general callousness and dark fascination, not anything more sinister.

Liam beats the hope back with each step he climbs to the floor where Winston has his office.

The man isn’t in yet when Liam gets there. Not terribly unusual for Ben, really. Experience says he’ll show up sooner or later, so Liam settles in outside the locked door, slouching in one of the chairs that decorate the hall on this floor.

Sooner it is. He hears the slight click of the man’s shoes as he rounds the corner, pace of his feet stuttering slightly when he spots Liam waiting for him.

“Payne,” he greets, unlocking the door with his eyes trained on the detective.

“Sir,” Liam returns easily. He tries not to recognize the venom running low and accusatory in his tone. Hopes Winston doesn’t, either.

But also, he admits to himself, very much hopes the man does.

“What’ve you got lined up for me first thing this morning?” Winston asks, sliding behind his desk and dropping his bag beside it. He looks tired.

Liam can sympathize. Doesn’t particularly feel like it, though. “The fishing boat related to the serial murders. Arson was never told to check for trace evidence on its interior.”

It’s telling, how quiet Winston is, fiddling with a pen in a way that makes no noise at all.

“Do you know why they were never instructed to check, sir?” Liam asks. No use dancing around it.

Winston’s face is without expression, but it’s an implicating kind of blankness. Liam would rate it slightly below the abilities of his six year old niece.

There’s no immediate answer. Liam waits, gaze falsely innocuous and probing. “Sir.”

“Initial inspection indicated nothing of value could be gleaned from the interior,” Winston says, not quite meeting the detective’s eyes. “I decided there were other avenues of investigation that would be more productive.”

The detective remembers that time, the frustrated promise presented by the boat’s burnt-out shell, the total lack of substantial leads.

_Other avenues._ Liam doesn’t scoff, but it’s resting soft in the back of his throat.

“Alright,” he allows. “I’m letting you know, then, that there were some rather substantial bloodstains in the vessel that I had arson recover this morning.”

Winston’s expression flickers, defensive and incredulous at the pinched corners of his eyes. “How does _that_ work? The whole thing was on fire, how—”

“Pinnock and I came up with a technique,” Liam answers. “Liquid latex. I’m—we’re making headway again, is the important part. Less than a day of looking— _really looking_ —at that boat and we’ve had progress.” He licks his lips, feels flame spark in his diaphragm with the rush of frustration. “So I’m curious as to why that wasn’t explored before.”

“You got your report,” Winston says, wave of his hand dismissive. “That initial report had all the vitals.”

“I’m _telling you_ it didn’t,” Liam insists, tone straining. Veering toward irritated. “So why—”

“Do you know how many man-hours that would’ve taken, to do some intense, inch-by-inch inspection?” Winston cuts in, properly defensive now. “Would’ve taken as long as getting the Hueffed lead, likely.”

“It wouldn’t have.”

“The media would have eating us _alive_ by then,” the man rambles, eyes dark and not, Liam realizes, really focused on him at all. Focused instead on some internal pressure. “The bad press would’ve—this investigation has been a hair away from becoming a _joke_ for a year now, another month of zero movement would have—”

“Since _when_ does the opinion of the press trump the integrity of an investigation?” Liam demands, volume rising with each word.

“It wasn’t even my idea,” Winston snaps. “Christ, if you _must_ know, I took it under _advisement,_ so I’d sorely appreciate if you’d stop looking at me like I’m trying to sabotage your bloody investigation.” Winston’s face has gone a little red, embarrassed and testy. Cornered. 

Liam lets out a hollow laugh that reverberates weirdly in his throat. He leans forward in his chair a bit, hands on the knobbed ends of the polished wooden armrests. “So it wasn’t even your idea, to give up on the fishing boat?” Liam’s tone is low and holding a dose of judgment, measured out to match the number of times Winston’s told Liam he expects everything from him. So much condescension, so much disapproval, all while he was withholding tools the detective could have _used._

Always such a power trip with this man.

“It came at an odd time,” Winston sniffs, petulant. “A different week and I’d have made the call myself, Payne.” He scratches at his arm, hidden under one of his cardigans. “And then we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, so. Not much need for it.”

There isn’t really time for Winston’s evasions. “What convinced you to give up our strongest—who—?” Liam tries, unsure how to say _how could you be so stupid_ without actually saying it. There’s a line he’s already barely toeing and, all contempt for Winston aside, he could, actually, like to keep his job.

Winston throws his hands up, smug demeanor traded in for taxed irritability. “How was I supposed to _know_ it was the strongest lead? Horan didn’t have a damn word to say about it being that important.”

Wait. “Horan,” Liam verifies.

“ _Yes,_ ” Winston grates. “If you need to get in a strop with someone, make it him.”

Liam tries, for a moment, to process that. Horan isn’t an idiot, he’d have known the boat was their best lead, even after the fire. Hell, the man is the one who called it in, the one who—

Everything goes silent inside the detective. Silent, and completely still.

Horan with his perfect knowledge of procedure. Horan with his assurances, over and over, that Liam wasn’t to blame for the murders, that _sick minds don’t need a reason._ Horan with his questions about Zayn. Horan with his careful eyes on Liam every time the man would look up from a new note.

Vision swimming, Liam tries to remember Horan’s hands. His hands. His writing, is he—

Shock waves travel faster than sound. It’s a moment before Liam realizes he’s standing, hovering over Winston’s face and pulling in air like he’s never breathed before, staggering gasps in the musty office.

“Is there—” and that’s all Liam hears before he’s tearing out of the room, feet pounding on tile.

The pieces keep clicking into place like vertebra as he races toward the office, moments he’d barely realized his mind had catalogued: Niall late to the pub, a body found waiting for them hours later. Niall the first one on the scene nine times out of ten, eyes grim as he filled Liam in. Niall shooting narrow looks at the boy monopolizing Liam’s attention. The note threatening him.

It’s endless and it’s obvious and Liam doesn’t have time to feel anything at all about it right now, can’t process much beyond shock and the painful beat of a pulse that tells him he’s nearly out of time.

Zayn hasn’t been seen by any of his professors for two days. It’s all Liam can think about.

He skids to a stop outside the door, wants to be at least composed enough to do this properly, pin Horan to the wall and cuff him in front of their entire team. The detective opens the door with his pulse still hammering.

It’s another world of chaos.

Cabello has her arms wrapped firmly around herself, expression furious where she argues loudly with Kloss. Kloss’ own hands flail as she gesticulates wildly, matching Cabello for pitch. Delevingne is shouting down a phone line and Tomlinson is holding some piece of paper in one hand while muttering into his mobile, pacing across the office to the filing room.

Horan is nowhere. Liam’s eyes scan the room, frantic. Nowhere and nowhere and nowhere.

“Liam.” Delevingne has spotted him, marching over with frantic eyes. “Liam, tell me what’s going on.”

“I was about to ask you,” he says, hand reaching out to steady the woman. Himself. Whoever. “Why is everyone—?”

“Wh—Liam, they’re saying you’re being brought in for _obstruction of justice,_ ” she says, eyes wide under thick brows, fully stricken. “That you hid files on the case. You—is that true?”

The detective feels his fingertips go numb. His tongue isn’t far behind. “I.”

The USB in his desk. All that info implicating Zayn.

He’d told Niall about it.

“They’re saying Zayn did it,” she continues, tone taking on a pleading air. Liam can relate. “They’re saying Zayn killed all those people, that little boy. You hid it?”

She’s as spun as Liam, every inch as terrified. Looking around again, he realizes they all are.

“Where’s Niall?” he asks. That’s what matters, what will save this situation.

“He’s out today, he called earlier.” She shakes her head, unsure why it matters.

It’s all that matters.

“Okay, there’s not—” Liam figures he has exactly one chance to get this right, the way Cara looks, distrustful and achingly confused. “There’s not a lot of time to explain. If Horan shows up, you need to arrest him, okay?”

Her mouth rounds with silent shock, contrast to the noise of Cabello calling Kloss something decidedly not nice in the background. “Arrest Horan.”

“I need your word,” Liam presses.

“I don’t—”

“ _Sergeant Delevingne_.” He knows how it looks. How it sounds. He holds his breath.

“I—yeah. Okay.” Cara gives him a tremulous look, but there’s something resolved resting beneath it. Something like trust. Liam feels slivers of pride pierce the shaky, adrenal nightmare of his consciousness.

“Okay.” He pushes out a rough breath, hoping either loyalty or self-preservation will push her this one extra step, not caring which it is. “If anyone asks any of you— _any of you—_ no one in this room knew about Zayn’s involvement with this or any case except me, okay? None of you knew.”

She shakes her head a bit, stuttering out another _okay,_ quieter than the first.

They’re still in the doorway of the office, unnoticed by their frenzied colleagues. “I want an explanation,” Cara informs him. “Later, I want one. This is some heavy shit, Liam.”

“Yeah,” Liam agrees, breathless. “I have to go, please—just remember what I told you, yeah?”

“Where are you—?”

“Don’t know,” he answers, spinning on his heel.

Niall is out. Zayn has been missing for days. It’s not hard to put together, detective or not.

He needs to start where it ended, he decides as he clambers into his car. The last place he saw Zayn was in his bed.  It doesn’t feel like enough to go on, but it has to be.

They’re already out of time.

 

“Y’haven’t touched your food.”

Zayn looks at the plate of mashed, mealy proteins. “It’s dog food,” he says. “Literally, it’s dog food.”

Niall laughs, ringing and empty when he crouches beside the boy. “Made with real pork. Says right on the tin.” He pitches his voice like an announcer.

The man pokes at the paper plate. It scoots infinitesimally closer to where Zayn sits with his arms and legs bound. Keeping him kneeling.

There’s an urge to gag that Zayn registers and represses, eyeing the brown mush. The smell is a bit much.

It’s the least of his concerns.

Zayn doesn’t dignify the man’s mocking remark with a response.

“You’re kind of a shit guest, you know,” Niall informs him. There’s an edge to his tone—impatience. Doesn’t like being ignored, then. The boy tucks that snippet away for later use.

“You kidnapped me,” he responds. “Not particularly _grateful,_ all told.”

He casts a glance around the space again. Zayn would characterize the room as _pathetic,_ small and empty save for the plate of dog food and the photos covering nearly every inch of wall space.

All of Liam. Near and far, some amateurish and out of focus, some clear. In most of them, he’s smiling with those warm brown eyes Zayn has concluded can most accurately be called kind. He’s smoking in a few others. Looking off to the side, where someone out of frame stands.

He’s looking at Zayn. Zayn knows this, the way he knew the second he bumped into Niall outside of Liam’s flat yesterday morning that something categorically unpleasant was about to occur.

He knows it the way he knows the human mind, intimately and with no room left for judgment.

He knows it the way he knows Liam is looking for him.

“You like my collection, babe?” Niall asks, catching Zayn’s glance and motioning around. There’s a pistol in his left hand that he seems only half aware of. The DI smiles at the boy, cold blue eyes and teeth like a Great White.

_Babe._ It’s this endearment Niall keeps using. When he pressed rope into Zayn’s wrists and when he occasionally knocks Zayn over with a shoe pressing into his chest.

He does it to see if he’ll squirm, Zayn thinks. He flexes his hands in their binds, shifts slightly on his knees.

“Reckon I like the real thing better,” Zayn responds. There’s a photo of Liam with his eyes squinted, shoulders up near his ears in a shrug. Joy. Amusement. Affection bleeding from his pores.

Zayn remembers it. Remember that specific moment, actually, the damp weight of the autumn air, the way Liam’s eyes nearly closed as his mouth gaped in loud amusement. A low-hanging sun.

“God, me too,” Niall says, heaving a dreamy sigh. He shuffles and comes to sit beside the boy with his shoulders against the wall, like they’re school mates in the hall between classes. The man looks over, smile nearly boyish. “What do you think he’s doing right now?”

“Figuring it out.” Zayn says it because it’s the truth and because he knows it’ll make Niall’s face twist.

It does. Predictable. Such basic science. “He’s not coming for you,” Niall tells him.

“Of course he is.”

“He doesn’t care about you like that.”

“I’m what he cares about most.” There’s no uncertainty in the declaration. Zayn won’t pretend, even in his own skull, to understand _why_ Liam is the way he is about him. He won’t feign ignorance, either.

Another one of those brittle, blistering laughs, right in his ear. “You gorgeous little idiot, do you really _think_ that?”

Whatever Niall sees when he examines Zayn’s impassive features is enough to make his own expression darken. “Liam isn’t like that,” Niall insists. “He’s—he couldn’t—he needs someone righteous, okay? Someone _good._ Someone—deserving.” Coaxingly, “Do you really think that’s you?”

Zayn has never thought that was him. He harbors no misconceptions of his own demons, numerous as they are.

It doesn’t alter the truth. Zayn stays quiet.

“Oh.” Niall sounds a little crestfallen, like he expected better. “You think he, what, loves you? That it?” He shakes his head minutely at Zayn. “Love is built on trust. In case you haven’t noticed, Liam doesn’t trust you for _shit._ ” The man cracks his knuckles languorously, pop after pop sounding from his joints. The sound drills directly into Zayn’s ear. _“_ He doesn’t want a psychopath.”

A breath of a laugh. “What d’you figure _your_ odds are, then?” Zayn asks. Niall’s small mouth pinches.

He gets shoved over again for his trouble, this time with a shoe resting squarely on his face. He tries to push up into it, leave a decently detailed bruise for them to trace if need be.

“All this is _for_ Liam,” Niall hisses. “No one knows that man better than me, no one would _do_ as much for him.”

“And yet he still doesn’t want you,” Zayn muses archly. “Funny how that w—”

There’s blood in his mouth, a jarring sense of unreality as he processes the dizziness of the kick and, only after, the flare of pain.

It settles something in him. A sanguine lullaby. This is also when Zayn first processes the flare of heat through his chest, his limbs.

Blood flooding his head and extremities to prepare for confrontation.

Anger. Dark at the edges and so, so welcoming, the way it makes everything clearer.

Not quite there yet, though. Zayn does a quick count. Twelve hours since he missed his evening dose of everything, the cocktail of pills he calls self-control.

The way the light fills this sad little room and its barren windows, too high for him to see out of properly, makes him think it’s been about four hours since he missed his morning dose. Well over twenty-four hours since he took anything, then.

They’re all in his rucksack. He doesn’t know where that is. He wonders if he’ll be alive to experience the worst parts of withdrawal. He’s already feeling the quick-release tension of his muscles, springs under his skin as he twitches at odd intervals.

Withdrawal is going to suck.

Niall does a weird thing, then. Zayn is still on the floor, swallowing a trace of blood—not enough to make him sick, never enough to make him sick—and the man crawls over top of him, lowering himself until he’s pressing down with one of Zayn’s shoulders digging into his chest. Zayn hears the clunk of the gun still in his hand when he sets it on the wood floor, sees the blunt edges of it out of the corner of his vision. Niall moves his mouth close to Zayn’s ear, breathing, “Don’t try and be smart, kiddo. It’s never been a good look for you. Gonna find it looks a lot worse here.”

Another flare of warm anger through Zayn’s muscles, making them twitch.

Or. Another twitch, less subtle. And another.

It’s accompanied by the first itch of sweat on his brow. Not the kind he usually enjoys when he’s under a man.

Under Liam. He finds him in one of the many photos papering the walls, observes the lines by his eyes when he’s grinning with his entire being.

He experiences empathic response so fully.  So obviously.

Mesmerizing, how strongly Liam Payne feels. From the first—

Zayn forces himself back to the issue at hand, away from his favored addiction.

Muscle tremors, he itemizes. Dry mouth, sweating. General nausea soon to follow. Hallucinations, if he makes it that long. Tenuously balanced pharmaceuticals leaving him through his pores, through the rare trips to the loo Niall allows.

Then the demons stop being his to control. That might be interesting.

He hasn’t seen them in a few years.

“ _This_ is kind of a good look for you,” Niall notes, crawling off to the side to watch Zayn twitch in his binds.

Withdrawal is going to _suck._

Yesterday morning, Zayn left with no trace of having ever been in Liam’s flat.

Perhaps the detective had mentally exaggerated the boy’s will to vanish, though, a lack of attentiveness or simply the histrionic lens of heartbreak; now that he’s looking, he sees pieces of him everywhere. Beyond the smell of cologne, beyond the dirty socks in his hamper. There’s a toothbrush at the sink, for fuck’s sake, bristles ragged and bringing to mind how Liam had reminded him twice to buy a new set for them on his way home from class.

Zayn always saddled him with this deeply unimpressed look when Liam would bring it up as they stood side by side at the sink. It hurts impossibly to remember, already feeling like a distant time.

He could be gone already. Zayn could be laying cold anywhere in the city, eyes haunting and glassy and _blank,_ chest torn apart to reveal what lies beneath.

It’s a fear Liam has entertained more than enough. Before the note naming Zayn, before he had even a shadow of awareness into how gone he was for the boy, Liam would wake up in cold sweats, groping for the warm body beside him.

It won’t go that way, though. Delevingne had said Liam was accused of hiding evidence supporting Zayn as their killer—two guesses who put _that_ forward—which means Horan can’t leave Zayn still and open the way he’s left so many.

Liam thinks of the man’s abrupt anger in the face of that dead woman’s boyfriend the other day. Thinks of the acute psychological agony brought on by the notes, blistering white and terrifying.

There’s a lot you can do to ruin a person short of killing them.

He shakes his head to break the sudden paralysis. Dangerous, to think too long on what else Niall might do to Zayn. Better to just keep it from happening. Liam hunts through the flat, throwing food in Loki’s dish when the dog looks up at him plaintively.

“What could Zayn have left us, love?” Liam asks. “How’re we gonna find him?”

If the pup has a solution he keeps mum, kibble crunching in his sharp teeth.

How indeed. Liam finds a few more chewed up pens under the couch—wonders if Niall had stolen one off Liam’s desk for that little touch at the last crime scene—and a sketch of a brain adorned all around with carefully-shaded rays of light. Lower on the scrap paper is a tiny, anatomical heart, lightly traced and lacking Zayn’s usual heavy lines, like it was a flyaway thought. He traces it with the lightest of touches.

_Don’t open,_ it says above the drawing in chunky scrawl, _dead inside._

A smile tugs at Liam’s reluctant lips. He tucks the paper in his pocket, lungs shredded by worry.

He finds a lot of random shit belonging to the boy throughout his flat. Clothes intermingled with his own in the closet, a pile of books on Zayn’s side of the bed. Burroughs, Palahniuk, July, Murakami. Liam wonders if he’d had a chance to finish any of them before—

Don’t think about it, he reminds himself. Don’t think about it. Just _fix_ it.

The cushion at the end of the sofa is a little dented where Zayn likes to squeeze into its corner. There are disks of Bollywood films Liam remembers from when Zayn was on hols sitting on top of the player. 

More than anything physical, there’s the reality of how empty the flat feels without the certainty that Zayn will walk through the door at the end of the day. Rucksack and mussed hair that’s getting long in earnest now and a sly little grin that Liam has always studied, hoping to understand.

He still doesn’t understand. He wants more opportunities to try.

Every opportunity, actually. It’s—it’s not the time for the realization, dead, heavy weight in Liam’s chest, not while he’s scanning the loo for any sign of where Zayn ended up after he slipped out the door yesterday morning.

There’s that sandalwood shampoo in the shower. It’s not helpful.

Liam kisses Loki on the head when the dog hops up onto the couch, murmuring some nonsense about letting the detective know if Zayn shows up. He struggles into his coat and hustles down the stairs, suffocating on answers he doesn’t have. 

He’s twitchy on the way out to the car, sensing eyes that aren’t there. It hadn’t occurred to Liam, before, how pervasive the sensation of being _watched_ had become for him over the last year. The killer’s dedications, the pressure from Winston, that incompetent prick—he pauses in front of his car and tries to remember a time he didn’t feel hunted.

Brief flickers arise in his mind’s eye. Moments of levity, moments free of fear. Clouded, instead, with other things. Things potent enough to choke on.

And something deeper, too, so profoundly felt he never thought to register its presence.

Simple, in that way.   

The lock ends up being easy enough to pick. Liam would feel bad, if it weren’t Zayn’s flat and Zayn’s life in the balance. He gives the hallway a furtive glance to check for witnesses before slipping into the space, bathed in familiarity immediately.

It feels uninhabited in a way that’s new. Liam supposes that’s on him, on the flat he’s stopped thinking of as only his. Still, it’s clean enough that Zayn could have been here recently—could have been here _yesterday,_ for all Liam knows—and so he has to trace his eyes and fingers over every surface of the place.

There’s nothing to be found in the living area, minimalist and immaculate as the day Liam first barged in and put his hands on Zayn like it could ever be as simple as merely touching for them. There’s nothing in the equally sparse kitchen. Nothing in the bedroom, duvet made up and untouched for who knows how long. Nothing in the bathroom.

Liam flips open the medicine cabinet. Nearly empty, Zayn’s daily supplies relocated to Liam’s flat.

This place is a shell, Liam is noticing. Beautiful and well-organized and empty of all the things that round Zayn out day-to-day. All the things filling the spaces in his own home.

Except.

Liam pushes open the door and breathes in the strong smell of paint, sharp aerosols and rich acrylics.

It’s still an assault on one’s sight, all the visceral input Zayn’s arranged on canvas in ways that seem dissonant but are singular in the way they provoke their viewer’s fear.

_Limbic system,_ Liam can hear Zayn whispering, _fight or flight._

All the punctures and tears. All the ways Zayn can be violent without ever drawing blood.

The detective sees it, finally, for what it is: a way to release an instinct for brutality the boy spends every day tuning out. Letting his shadowed half play, appeasing it with the harsh movements and splattering gore they crave without every hurting a soul.

It’s him dealing.                                                                           

It’s a place he spends roughly as much time studying as he does painting, if the scattered notes and stray textbooks are any indication.

Liam checks the meticulously dated notebook pages. None of them are from the last four days. He skims a hand over the canvas left on Zayn’s easel.

It’s something…stratified, he thinks, though he can’t yet tell what. Some morbid cross-section he can’t identify, half the lines still pencil. The one corner holding paint is dry when he lightly touches it.

_It’s not done yet,_ Zayn had said.

The detective leaves it be. Wonders what’ll become of these paintings if—

A self-reprimand, a renewed focus on the rest of the space. From what Liam’s gathered over months, this is the most lived-in part of the flat. Where Zayn disappears to when he’s not at Liam’s table or on his sofa or in his bed, not in a classroom or at the library or lurking in the halls of the Yard. 

Not helpful. He leans against a clear wall space near the door of the room, staring at the snippets of Zayn’s soul laid out in full, gory detail. He thinks of where else the boy might have been when Niall found him.

Not class, if his professors are to be believed. Not the station. It occurs to Liam that, for all Zayn is socially adept—for all he’s portrayed himself as such—he can’t list a single friend of the boy’s that isn’t part of the investigation team.

There’s a sweep of sadness through the detective considering it. He doesn’t know if Zayn gets lonely, if his brain gives him the capacity to be, but he imagines it must be hard, hiding so much of oneself from the world.

With one exception. Liam’s eyes refocus on a painting of an abstracted ribcage, lined on the undersides by eerie red. He pulls his mobile out from his pocket without looking away.

“Is this Trisha? It’s—it’s Detective Inspector Payne. Liam, yeah. How are you? Good. Doing well, yeah. Thank you. Uh, listen,” he licks over his teeth once, eyes roving the room. “I’m wondering—do you happen to have Caroline Watson’s contact information?”

It’s not a long drive from the campus, the practice Caroline works in. Still too long to bear when tracking an individual who’s been abducted. But on a normal day, Liam can easily imagine Zayn tucked into a seat on the tube with headphones in and gaze fixed on nothing, jostling with the movement of the train car, settled into his routine.

The door shows his reflection in blue as the detective pushes into the lobby. When he finds the name and floor on the directory by the elevator bank, he takes a minute to catch his breath while he stabs at the button and waits, heel jiggling impatiently.

He’s got his badge out before the receptionist has even opened his mouth.

“Detective Inspector Payne,” he says quickly. “I’m looking for Caroline Watson?”

The man just nods mutely, eyes a little wide as his hand moves to the phone. “One moment.”

She appears in a doorway less than a minute after being summoned, clothing sleek and casual, hair loose around her. Wholly unthreatening, which is likely the idea.

“Liam?” she greets, shrewd eyes watching his expression.

Liam reaches out to shake her hand. Of course they’ll skip the introductions. “Suppose we crossed paths the other day,” he notes.

“Didn’t fully expect that,” she admits. One warm hand is on Liam’s elbow, gently guiding him toward the hall. “I’m not, strictly speaking, allowed to approach my clients in public unless they approach me first.” Caroline gives him a look over her shoulder, calmly gauging the man. “But if you’re here, it means he’s filled you in about our sessions.”

Through a tight throat, Liam says, “Not. Not quite. Uh, may we continue this in—”

“Right, yes.” She holds the door to her office for him in a way that suggests she holds it for her actual clients. The room is pale gold with plants everywhere.

Liam sits in the quashy chair opposite the one Caroline takes. Imagines Zayn in this same spot. Still petulant-eyed, still evasive in revealing the path his inner demons prowl. But trying.

“I’m here because he’s missing,” Liam says, no time to dance around it. Caroline’s eyes widen. “He’s been gone for two days and you’re the only person I can imagine knowing why he might take off and where he might go.”

And if she doesn’t, it makes Liam’s job simpler. Not easier—never that—but simpler, because it means Niall _certainly_ has him, managed to get to him before he could even start in on his day. It’s means the man is setting the stage for whatever the next horrific twist is.

The woman seems to be considering, mouth pursed while her eyes trace the carpeting. “He’s not…Zayn doesn’t run. That’s not how he’s learned to deal with things.”

Liam can feel his brow crinkle. “What? What do you mean?”

He’s being a bit short, a bit desperate, and if he wasn’t sure he was in a room with the only person who might understand _why_ he’s bleeding concern and quiet panic in every syllable, he’d apologize. But he can’t imagine Zayn never mentioned that Liam is half-insane over him. He’s not done much to hide it.

_You’re kind of fucking hopeless about him, huh?_

Throwaway moments spring to mind for an instant, little words from Niall indicating just how closely he was watching Liam’s spiraling infatuation; the detective thinks he might have done better not to care so openly.

He can’t shake the sensation that he set Zayn up for this.

Caroline is talking, apology on her brow. “I’m not really meant to share the particulars of Zayn and I’s appointments, Liam, I apologize.”

“I know he’s—I know about his disorder. His ASPD. I know about his childhood and in-patient.” He leans forward a bit. “But I’m not here as a—as someone who knows him. He’s _missing._ Anything you have that might help us find him—”

“I don’t really _have_ anything,” Caroline says, calm like she’s been trained for in the face of Liam’s rapid speech and pleading gaze, “that’s what I can tell you. He’s—if you know about Zayn’s stay in in-patient then you know he’s been working with me for a long time. There’s a…system, we use. I help him steer his emotions, build a code that he can live by. That society can live _with_.” She shakes her head slightly. “It doesn’t include running from problems. Responsibilities. We work through them here, instead.”

Liam nods, remembering Trisha’s words the other day, a repeat of her son’s own. _She’s my moral compass._ “And he listens to you absolutely?”

The woman shrugs, unbothered by the challenge in Liam’s tone. He can see how she might be a good fit for Zayn. “Nearly. A little less, lately.” Sharp eyes on him. “He has you.”

A hard lump of air collapses in on itself inside Liam’s throat. “I’m not—so he _might_ have run,” he guesses. “If—if the circumstances were right, if he felt pressure, he might leave town? Or his—routine?”

“What—sorry, just trying to piece this together so I can help—what would he have been running from, detective?” Caroline’s eyes are narrow, like she might have an idea.

“Just.” Nothing and everything, a fight they never quite had, an accusation Liam never quite made. “Things were a bit tense between us with the investigation I’m running, and I was…I was a bit cold to him. A little accusatory.” He swallows, shakes his head a bit thinking about it. “He was hiding something but I didn’t know what.”

The detective half expects Caroline to pull out a notepad, start jotting down what’s been said so they can explore it later on. He wonders if she can psychoanalyze better than Zayn. He wonders if this is where he learned it.

“So the ASPD, the treatment, he didn’t share that with you directly,” the woman guesses after a silent moment.

Liam nods. “It’s a long story, but—yeah, he never shared it with me directly.”

The woman shifts, legs crossing at the knee. “Alright, that’s—ah, not to go all ‘shrink’ on you, detective, but I think that’s something you’ll want to address when you find him. He won’t appreciate learning about it some other way.”

She says it like it’s an absolute, like finding Zayn whole and healthy and willing to talk to him is a given, and Liam bites back a protest that it’s not that easy, feels the seconds tick away in his veins.

“But the only place I can imagine him going besides here when he’s been put off by something is to _you,_ Liam, so if you haven’t seen him then I’m afraid I’m of no help.” She tilts her head just a bit, mild sympathy for the long exhale Liam lets out. He thinks bitterly as he winds back out of the suite of offices that she really does strike him as a fantastic therapist. Zayn is lucky to have her.

Was lucky. Is lucky. He quickens his stride to the car.

Zayn isn’t prone to flight, then. Doesn’t take off into the faint blue edges of morning, disappear like he never wants to be found. His moral code, his compass, it doesn’t allow for it. Liam wonders how much Caroline’s heard of the growing cold between the pair, Liam’s chilly separation egged on by suspicion. He wonders if she knows about that, too, the allegations which sat tucked under Liam’s tongue whenever he pressed his lips into the boy’s skin for weeks before these last hellish days.

But they’d have _dealt_ with it, Caroline and Zayn, together in that little gold room. She seemed certain, sure of her client of five years and how he’d behave.

She’d effectively ruled out the possibility of him running. Of even attempting to.

Possibilities are few. Liam knows not to waste time on unlikely avenues when the most obvious is right there.

Niall has Zayn. It’s that simple.

He could kick himself for not knowing _where._ There’s no time to be unsure, not with how he keeps imagining a cruiser pulling him over in afternoon traffic, his colleagues taking him in for questioning on the evidence he’d gathered and _hidden,_ removed from the crime scene. There’s no time to wander and make the wrong call, head off down one avenue only to learn later—after it’s stopped mattering, after he’s stopped being able to keep Zayn safe from anything at all—that he should have tried a different route altogether.

Whatever he does next, he has to get it right the first time.

He’s back in front of his flat, standing on the pavement and paralyzed by the need to make the correct call. Pressure like cinderblocks closes in around his skull, breathing verging on panicky for a moment.

Zayn was last seen in his flat. Zayn would have—stepped outside, whether by free will or coercion, pale, capable hand on his shoulder, grabbing at the material of his jacket, and—

And then what? Liam looks down the block, coat billowing, looks up and past his building and all around it. And then what?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **_(Pssst tag your spoilers psssst!)_ **


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They’re paused, now. The fingers. Still and crimson._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Not much to say, besides thank you as always to the wonderful Monica, the stupendous Melissa, everyone who's taken the time to chat with me about TKT, and the astounding fan artists (whose work you can find on my tumblr and which is absolutely lovely).
> 
> Enjoy.

Withdrawal does, in fact, suck.

It’s darker than the sensation of pills, Zayn notes. Sharper than the drugs offered by people with nothing else to entice him. It’s more all-encompassing than a late dose, sending him listing off halfway through the morning or jerking awake as he suddenly remembers in the middle of the night.

Not quite like anything he’s ever experienced. Never has let himself experience it—prefers his sense of reality and stomach contents intact, for the most part.

They’re leaving him now, one a tad more messily than the other.

“I’m not gonna clean that up for you, you know,” says Niall, standing and leaning on the wall opposite where Zayn is bent nearly in half, retching with awful little sounds.

Zayn doesn’t see why the man _wouldn’t_ clean it up. It’s not much, not with how Zayn hasn’t eaten in two days. Mostly just bile. “Guess you have to live with the stain, then.” It hurts to talk.

“Makes you rethink the meds, though, yeah?” If he had to guess, Zayn would say Niall is rotating his head on his shoulders, the way his voice lilts and bounces around the room, the way it drags indolently on his syllables. “You should know better than anyone that they fuck you up.”

Zayn knows. Dizziness and insomnia, tremors. Suicidal tendencies.

Not exactly simple, finding a combination that works. He knows that, too. “You’re doing fine without. Clearly,” he says, raw and scathing.

A bang on the wall above his head. Zayn flinches before he can stop himself. He cranes his neck up slowly, fighting against the beginnings of a wracking chill through his body.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Niall demands. His eyes are something heated, something metallic. 

A hard inhale through a stinging throat. There are several directions Zayn could take this.

“Means your obsession’s _embarrassing,_ mate,” he slurs, deciding to aim for the heart. “Li’s shown less than zero interest and you’re still—absolutely gagging for a minute of his time.” He focuses on breathing, calming the spasms of his stomach.

Another slam of the man’s fist to the wall, booming. White white white knuckled. 

Bones. _Metacarpal phalangeal joints,_   Zayn’s mind supplies on autopilot. Sensitive to inverse pressure, susceptible to fracture—

Another stab of nausea has him doubling back over, head snapping down.

There might be sick in his hair.

“I’m _loyal,_ ” Niall snarls, still hovering above him. “Understand, alright, him and I are the same like that.”

Such a romantic outlook spent on the wrong things. “He’s plenty loyal, yeah.”  Zayn can feel his hands shake in their binds. Wishes he could wipe at his mouth. “Still not convinced he’s gonna love the whole serial murder thing you got going.”

“Do you see my name anywhere in here?” Niall motions broadly around the room, the photos, and for a moment his fingers are as spindly and long as a conductor’s baton. Zayn blinks until the vision clears and his brain forces order. “Everything points to you, sweetheart.” A dark little chuckle. “He’s suspected you for ages, too, you know that? Has this evidence file and everything. Barely had to do anything to set this up. It’s—it’s kinda great, innit?”

It’s not great. It wasn’t great when Zayn kneeled sopping up Loki’s blood, Liam’s voice a hard weight above him. It wasn’t great when Liam’s mouth stopped twitching up into an easy, reflexive smile whenever Zayn appeared at his shoulder.

It wasn’t too terribly fucking fun, losing control of the situation like that. Watching his hold on Liam disintegrate while wedged between two shitty choices: explain the disorder, the urges Zayn wears like a second skin, and watch Liam’s face fall as the reality set in, or explain nothing and watch the space between them gain mass anyway.

A miscalculation, he thinks. Liam was ready to know. Even when doubt bled from his eyes, even when Zayn was sure he was going to wake up to a discontinuation of easy warmth, the detective seemed intent on keeping Zayn around for as long as the boy would have him.

It’s perplexing, but it’s not nothing.

He still hasn’t said anything by the time Niall is striding to the door. “Back in a few hours, babe,” he calls carelessly as it slams behind him.

Zayn wretches again.

 

Liam nearly falls victim to a speeding van when he crosses in the middle of his street, breath leaving cold little clouds in his wake.

He reaches the pavement and spins, viewing his building from the other side. Not sure what it might tell him. Thinking of all the possible places Niall could have approached from. Up or down the way. In one of the station’s cars.

The other detective wouldn’t risk using a Met vehicle, though, Liam is sure of it. Too conspicuous, too well-monitored. He’d know better.

That’s the thing. Horan knows better because Horan knows the _Met_ , its protocols and its safeguards. Its limitations.

Liam scans the area, mind racing for logical conclusions, and wonders how long it took. How many months did the murders take for Horan to plan? How many years had the intent lined his skin?

How long had it festered?

The detective counts memories like pebbles, little moments he hardly noticed himself accumulating. Niall with his generosity and patience and quiet solidarity, Niall with his face set in sympathy, Niall with his unwavering loyalty. Niall with his hands on Liam, small soft touches to his arms and neck and shoulders.

Niall with his constancy, is what Liam remembers most. Always, always there in the back of the pub after a long day or the thick of a scene or at the moment of rupture between friends.

Because he was, wasn’t he? It hits Liam, then—Niall was perfectly capable of creating doubt in Louis’ mind. Plenty of opportunity. Long nights by the pathologist’s side while Liam was off losing himself in the heat of Zayn’s gaze, his body.

That must have _killed,_ Liam thinks. He stares almost blindly at his building across the way, struck by the realization.

Some twisted form of admiration, victims who were very literally left with their hearts in hand. The notes, grandiose and seeping eerie affection.

Zayn didn’t have to do any of that, did he? Made one of a thousand bad choices one night, mesmerized an officer over the course of a car ride. Waltzed into what’s meant to be a fortress. Made it his.

Made Liam his, in about a thousand different ways.

No wonder Niall targeted him. Liam thinks of the man’s behavior in the last weeks, the attention bordering on stifling. The clear eyes and massive grins. He’d already decided to take Zayn at that point, hadn’t he? To frame him for such livid crimes.

The boy was the last obstacle in Niall’s path, after all. The only thing Liam ever seemed to see.

He shakes his head, slaps at his own face. This isn’t the time to lose himself in— _any_ of it. Niall can be interrogated for motive later; Zayn might never answer for his own deceptions. Might not have the chance, if Liam can’t figure this out.

A swell of frustrated panic has him kicking out at the damp, spongy ends of cigarettes littering the pavement. There’s a load of them, ashy and foul.

Habitual smoke spot, Liam’s brain decides. A tenant of the building behind him.

He wonders what the odds might be that they saw Niall take Zayn, saw how it happened.

Liam slaps himself again, and this time it’s more of a reprimand. He’s a _detective,_ for fuck’s sake. What the hell is happening to his mind that he’s not even considered looking for witnesses?

He wheels around. Pushes past the building’s heavy front doors.

 

Insects dart from cracks in the walls, small and dark and clearest when Zayn catches them out of the corner of his eye.

Zayn isn’t focused on them. Can’t be, the way everything is swimming sickeningly around him, colors off, scents wrong. Can’t be, with how Niall’s reappeared.

“You know what I was thinking about?” the man asks. He seems completely unbothered by the way Zayn is shaking, the way sweat is collecting at the dip of his throat while his eyes move back and forth, frenetic. “This is completely random, but. When they publicize you killing all those people…” A pause. He might be relishing what he’s saying, he might be rotating his head a full 360 degrees on his neck, Zayn doesn’t have the faintest fucking clue, he can barely _see._ “…What’re they gonna call you?” A sharp laugh. “I mean you’re bloody fit, I’m sure half the nation’s going to be—oh, y’know what, I got it. The _Heartthrob Killer._ Yeah? Has a ring to it.”

Zayn tries to make oxygen more helpful than it’s proving to be, shuddering inhales. “’ve got alibis,” he rasps. He pulls against the rope at his wrists. The angle behind his back is awkward to leverage weight into.

They won’t break, the ropes. Won’t come undone either, all his fiddling with the knots yesterday leaving him with nothing but an ache in his biceps.

They will bruise him, though. It’s what he needs. A sign of struggle. Foul play.

Something for Liam to go on, to know what happened here.

“What, your shrink?” Niall asks. He tutts, short little clicks that sound like gunfire between Zayn’s ears. “You’re not hard to follow, you know. So wrapped up in yourself.” A pause. Zayn watches a bead of sweat drip from his brow to the floor. “Conceited,” Niall finally decides, striding closer.

Bit of a misdiagnosis, Zayn thinks hazily. There’s conceit and then there’s selfishness that runs to one’s core, to their stem cells. The type of thing that has to be actively guarded against. A predisposition that demands examination every single minute of the day.

An impulse he refuses.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Niall stretch his arms above his head, like this is a lazy day in and not him coming to check in on his captive. Scuttling into the room from wherever it is he waits, muted sounds through the walls. “Your little head doctor seems nice.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything. Words are growing steadily harder to give conviction, quaking like his spine.

“Sweet Caroline…” Niall sings it as if he expects Zayn to jump in and join him. Doesn’t seem perturbed when he only stares with fractured vision.

“She’s got a daughter, you know that? Cute little kid. _Brooklyn._ ” Niall scratches his arm through the top of his sleeve. “Can’t imagine she’ll be very keen on testifying you were in her office when she gets these.”

He pulls them out of nowhere, appears them like magic. Which can’t be, Zayn’s mind struggles to correct, the man had to have been holding them or picked them up, can’t have—but they’re sliding across the floor, sound on the wood like a million fingernails rasping across unglazed pottery.

Zayn feels a shudder go through him at the sound, feels the words _auditory distortion_ press into the side of his skull like a kiss.

The photos land in their little paperclipped stack at a bad angle, practically upside down. Photos, Zayn reinforces, because they’re glossy. Photos, because Caroline can’t possibly be that small.

Brooklyn. Brooklyn is almost that small. Just a tiny girl, still a baby, mostly. Zayn has met her a dozen times, had her clamber into his lap on sight. Warm weight, easy energy. One of the only things he’s sure he feels allegiance to, Brooklyn Watson.

There’s a target painted over her face.

Restraint drips away like acid when Zayn struggles in his binds this time. He needs _out,_ needs out so he can tear this son of a bitch to pieces, make him choke on his own blood—

“Hey,” comes a sharp voice. _Liam,_ Zayn thinks, thought slipping when he registers Niall’s steps coming closer. Not Liam, too high a timbre, not Liam, too cold a hand on his neck.

“Stop fucking pulling at them,” someone hisses. Snakes, sneaking—the man presses his wrists together, holds them tight.

“If I bruise they’ll know,” Zayn croaks through chapped lips, unsure where the words come from. Mercury drips into an eye, burning it out of the socket. Sweat, no, it’s only sweat.  Only his body giving in to its sudden deficiencies of everything that makes it human. Chemically constructed cages for every one of his demons.

A noise, a nearly inhuman grunt, and there’s a gun at Zayn’s forehead, dead center on the clammy skin. It’s cold and cold and easy to focus on, that blunt metal. Zayn’s eyes fall shut, waiting.

“Don’t try a thing or I’m putting you down.” The words swoop in pitch and reverberate, all encompassing. Zayn is still trying to see past their echo as he feels the tension on his wrists break, the press at his ankles release.

A dark laugh bubbles, can’t make it past Zayn’s desiccated throat but lodges inside him, filling him up with something noxious. He realizes what he’d meant to do with the binds removed. Pictures the way his fingers could dig at flesh until it tore, teeth joining the fray. Blood in his mouth and spilling down his chin when he screams into the man’s face, utter terror made into a final memory.

It’s the clearest image in his sweltering head, but Liam is watching him. Liam is watching from every corner of the room, Liam with his fathomless belief in humanity, Liam with his kind eyes and challenging mind.

Zayn’s demons don’t deserve to share a world with Liam Payne.

But their cage is fragile, splintering with the way this other detective, this inferior detective, unrighteous and with clip-on wings, refuses to give Zayn some _space._ “If you get sick on me I’m putting a bullet in your mouth.”

The demons laugh, rattle what’s left of their prison. _Pray that’s all I do to you,_ Zayn wants to say. His mouth won’t cooperate, barely managing ragged pants. He’s got both hands pressed to the floor to steady himself on his knees, watching his flesh meld with the wood until he’s stuck, he’s part of this room.

He’s going to die here.

It’s not scary. It’s never been scary, was welcome, actually, when he used to load up with the lads on whatever they could get, oblivion so close he could feel it press into his lungs.

Niall mutters to himself, a murmur of words Zayn can’t put together fast enough while the room constantly rearranges.

“I’ll be back, don’t pass out yet.” The man is in the doorway, towering and all Zayn can see when he looks through the film on his vision. “Or do,” he seems to boom, “might make it easier.”

There’s no logic to it. No logic anywhere, here. Too many Liam’s on the walls, trusting Zayn to sleep in their bed and card fingers through their hair and push back the choking clouds inside, ignore the shadow that grows behind him.

Collapse sounds good, muscles of Zayn’s arms nearly singing relief when he falls forward. His face is half on wood and half on the cold gloss of a photo, mum and daughter outside a restaurant. Trembling, twitching, trembling, it blurs, no relief from each jolting sensation. Something is wet between his cheek and the photo. It’s sweat or it’s tears but it’s meant to be blood. It’s meant to be blood.

The man reemerges, more rope in hand. Thicker. He’s got a stool, too, a little chair to sit on.

He doesn’t sit on it, doesn’t fold up his too-many legs— _spider,_ Zayn thinks—and perch. It’s dragged (grating sound again all over Zayn and inside him, shivers and shivers and shivers) to the center of the room before the man is standing upon it. A beacon, but not a very righteous one.

The rope is on something, on—silver. A hook embedded in the ceiling, a snake of rope that curls into itself further down.

Zayn’s insides snarl, discomfort with the image that he can’t place. His arms twitch, want to be moving, want to be _hurting._

Can’t. Not with Liam watching.

“That’s right, babe, yeah,” Niall coos as he kneels down. Cold fingers stroking down Zayn’s back, ice water chills. “Let it happen, just gotta get you—”

The wall is soft against his shoulder blades, cottony. He can disappear into it, the wall and the floor. Liam can watch him sleep.

But his head is being yanked forward, and there’s—weight, chafing weight, there’s rope, it’s—

“Hold still,” Niall grunts, hands insistent. Cold black metal flashes at his waist.

The laugh builds in Zayn again, dark as his eyes when he reaches with the speed he can manage for the weapon.

A pale hand stops him, harsh words tumbling through the cracks in Zayn’s fractured skull, his splitting skin.

He surrenders control.

 

Liam’s fist is poised to knock on the door of the first flat off the building’s main entrance. Something is stilling him, though. He can’t quite place it. Some image—he gives his mind a moment to put a picture to the itch under his skin, the crackle at the base of his skull.

Cigarettes. All those ugly spent ends on the pavement outside.

The pull of an addiction he’s grown accustomed to denying, maybe. Even if they weren’t his brand. Even if they smelled like they might have been menthols.

Yet. Liam tastes their smoke on the back of his tongue, familiarity nipping at his senses. Yet there’s…there’s something…

The memories click over, springing to mind like a demon’s face jumps from darkness. Strong recollections of which Liam desires no ownership: cold air and the grit of the school’s brickwork when Liam pressed his forehead to it, needing a moment away from the reality of the little boy’s tiny, broken body. Heavy, coursing grief, shock so painful it almost registered as numb. A voice, coarse with tears and something Liam didn’t yet know to label as twisted guilt.

And Niall. The smell of his cigarettes.

That’s what those are. Liam swoops out the door and back down the stoop, plucks one of the more intact butts up to examine. It’s damp all the way through, pale gold with a familiar little insignia on either side.

Unmistakable.

Liam looks at the flat behind the tree. Several stories, practically nonexistent for how it blends into the others on either side. Like Liam’s. Exactly, actually, mirrored design almost down to the grime. Directly across the street from his flat, too.

Easy access. Easy to know when Liam or Zayn were coming or going, when they were together or alone, when Loki got walked and which of them did it at which hour. Easy to get a sense of their schedules, watch them in the light of Liam’s two little bedroom windows that he hates to shut the blinds on. Watch them kiss. Watch them argue. Watch them touch each other.

The realization, Liam is aware, happens in an instant—couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds since he looked down at the cigarettes littering the ground.

He skips the middle steps to push himself to the flat’s door once again, fingers closing on the handle when he hears something instantly recognizable. 

Carrying, and carrying, and carrying.

A bang. The worst thing Liam’s ever heard.

He knows he screams. Knows it takes the shape of Zayn’s name as his feet pound up a flight of stairs, then another.

Two flights. If Niall wanted to watch them, learn their habits, he’d choose the flat exactly mirroring Liam’s own. A perfect view.

The door is locked until it isn’t, until Liam’s kicked the knob into dysfunction, splintering the wood. He tries not to notice the nervous neighbors with their mobiles in hand, dialing the Met or watching on with wide eyes.

Liam knows, through static fear, which room they’ll be in. The others are nearly bare as he flies past them. He knows that what he’s looking for—racing toward—he’ll find behind the door closed tight at the end of the hall. No lock, so he can push inside, lungs burning and a name expelled from his chest once more as he faces whatever tragedy-soaked reality he’ll be forced into after this. He stills in the doorway.

The room is covered in blood.

Blood, and pictures of Liam.

One registers before the other, ghastly crimson that can’t be explained away with the presence of a canvas. A fine spray on the far wall, drops condensed as they get closer to the center. To the slump of a body, spilling red onto the floor. Coating the hands of the person crouched over it.

They look up as Liam steps into the room, last of winter’s rarest, most piercing light catching their eyes, the blood on their hands.

Their hands. Their wrists, dripping to their elbows. Clothing soaked through from how they’re hovering over a form that’s so recently gone still, blood still pouring from the wound that’s been gouged at, pulled apart by seeking fingers.

They’re paused, now. The fingers. Still and crimson.

The sun shifts and Zayn’s eyes can’t catch the light like this, dark and glassy like he’s not even inside his own skin. Like he left when Niall did, blank blue open and vacant and aimed at the ceiling.

Liam doesn’t have time to really process the look of Zayn’s chapped lips, flecked with someone else’s blood, or the bruises at his temple, at his wrists. Doesn’t have time to watch the way Niall’s blood drips from the pictures on the walls, sliding down the detective’s cheeks in one of hundreds of photos that show him moving and breathing and laughing, oblivious. Doesn’t have time to do much more than trip over the coil of rope on the floor, smell something sweet and acrid like old sick.

The boy is silent as he watches Liam stumble to him. His hair’s a cataclysm above his empty expression, eyes rimmed in red like they’d burned until they were dead coals. No light at all.

Liam gives himself three seconds of only staring, taking in a handful of the details of Zayn like this. Sunk so far into ruination but unrelentingly alive, breathing the air made thick by humid iron. He examines the fan of his lashes. The width of his shoulders. The curve of his spine where he hunches. The _fact_ of him: alive, alive, alive.

Three seconds where they stare.

Then he knees the boy in a sharp uppercut to the jaw, watching his head snap backward as he loses consciousness.

Zayn falls back from the spill of Niall’s blood, Niall’s paling body, and there’s a moment where Liam thinks he might not be able to step over him to reach where the boy slumps.

He does, though, steps over the killer of eleven people with an attempted twelfth, the man who lied to his face and breathed suspicion into his ear, who dressed as a friend and went about burning Liam’s life down. He scoops Zayn’s limp body into his arms, sirens in his ear all the way from street level. Turns back toward the door.

They meet him on the street, attendants he doesn’t recognize and a team that isn’t his racing in behind him. Someone pulls Zayn from his arms onto a stretcher, eyes wide at the amount of blood they can’t trace back to a proportionate wound. Someone else has their hands on Liam, probing at his flesh like the blood’s maybe his, like he’s the reason Zayn looks this way.

Loud. It’s all very loud, people communicating at scream level and the sound of confused residents demanding answers from inside the building, men and women in crisp uniforms thundering up the stairs and shouting orders, _get back inside_ and _police, get out of the way._

Someone’s radio hisses that there’s another body, which sends a flurry of medical personnel scurrying up the steps with an ungainly stretcher. Liam watches it through glass. From deep underwater.

There are words attached to people, mouths moving to tell the detective—lots of things, it seems. Something about talking, something about questioning. It doesn’t register but it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t, because they load him into a car he doesn’t recognize to take him somewhere he doesn’t know.

It becomes an exercise in sensory deficiencies. Liam lives under snow, can’t hear or feel a thing except the insistent cold blanketing him, the muffled words he can’t parse from the people in the front seat. They’re wearing clothing he knows he also owns, dark and crisp. They’re shooting him anxious glances in the rearview.

Twitch. A spasm to Liam’s fingers, like they’re grabbing for something that’s not there. They’re sticky with what he knows to be red but sees as black, and it reminds him a bit of the thing he’s looking for.

It’s not quite the same.

He sits down in a hospital room still feeling like he’ll reach out and find whatever it is he’s lost. Whatever’s left him wearing blood that isn’t his.

He doesn’t think it’ll have much of an apology for him, for putting blood on his hands.

He just doesn’t.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"This is the end, isn't it?"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn, okay. I'm gonna write a big schmoopy thing on my tumblr about what an incredible, rewarding, challenging, fantastic experience sharing TKT with you guys has been, and I'll prooooobably post it here, but for now?
> 
> For now, I want you to have this.

There’s no known method of waking up at two in the afternoon and feeling anything but disgusting.

It’s the third thought Liam entertains after his eyes open. It follows first the realization that he’s no longer cushioned in the kind unrealities of oblivion and second, the bleak resignation to another day.

He blinks grimy eyes at his mobile. It’s inching toward three.

Loki seems to have realized Liam is now among the living, has his front paws on the bed and a vaguely thunderous look to his eyebrows, fluffy white against black.

It’s ultimately the expectant look from the dog that convinces Liam to roll off the mattress and onto his feet. He spills into a pair of trousers that his hands can barely find the motivation to fasten, wrists feeling heavy as he tugs on shoes and then a hoodie, because it’s February and he doesn’t really fancy that being how this ends.

_Head detective of serial murder investigation found frozen into ice lolly outside flat,_ the Daily Mail would report.

If they cared to. If anyone cared to. Beyond however they’re weaving them into horrific crime report programs with titles like _The Terror Within_ , London is happy to forget the individuals involved in the serial murders of the last year. They’re sated, feeling the token sentiments and reading the sensationalist press. Happy to dig no deeper and push no further.

The crime’s been solved; there’s always something new and terrible to fixate on.

The official line is that Liam has declined all interviews following the incident. A swell of requests have surged forth in the wake of that day—that awful, blood-soaked day—to hear from the detective who headed the investigation.

The colleague of the killer. The lover of the last intended victim who, allegedly, has a bit of a story himself.

It all makes for a _salacious_ tale, apparently. One that would be quick to sell.

Liam won’t open his fucking mouth about it. He shoulders past the stray reporters waiting by the door to his building, the random civilians who think they’ve got the _investigative spirit._ All shouting his name, asking questions. Loki doesn’t growl—Loki is probably the most docile beast on the planet, grateful simply that his head isn’t stuck in a cone anymore—but his ears go back until they’re clear of the small crush of people, perturbed just as Liam is by the noise and claustrophobic persistence.

The man doubts it’s as obvious on his face, though. He’s noticed, in mirrors and the glare off windows and in the backs of spoons, that he’s not been particularly emotive in the last week.

Since.

When Loki’s done his thing and the cold air has cut through Liam’s hoodie until it feels as though his nipples could cut glass, they head back around the corner and into the flat, past the people still waiting. Like somehow Liam has changed his mind in the time it took his dog to piss on a tree.

Careful, determined, Liam doesn’t let his eyes linger on the building across from his. Can stop himself, here and in front of strangers. Doesn’t succumb to the urge to sit and stare as he has countless times in the privacy of his own bedroom, looking out the windows to the ones exactly opposite. The room where Zayn almost died and Niall actually did.

Lately it’s felt like he’s trying to scrape the taste of saline from the back of his throat every time he brushes his teeth. Today is no exception.

He brushes harder. Maybe this time.

Never had Liam thought to wonder what the funeral for an officer who committed a heinous series of acts might look like. Who might attend. What they might say.

It’s politics, it turns out. It’s all just politics. Liam wishes he didn’t understand, couldn’t fathom the cynical reasoning of such an artfully crafted, solemnly executed event.

They couldn’t really honor Horan, couldn’t excuse his actions. Not with biological evidence in the fishing boat to indicate his presence before its burning. Not with his fingerprints found in Sam Hueffed’s flat, on the cord found wrapped around his neck. Not after the finding that a sinistral individual had to have committed the murders (and it’s fitting, Liam thinks, that the word meaning _left-handed_ is so dark in texture). And not with the shaking testimony of Gracie Yang, a girl in year seven at the last victim’s school, that a blond man had been talking to the boy on the edge of the playground shortly before he disappeared.

But he’d been among their numbers, a man of the law in name, at least, and there are fewer opportunities as perfect to show the Met’s humanity than a funeral for one of their own.

A few people had cried, when they’d lowered the dark coffin into the ground. Kloss and one of the boys who works the front office, Delevingne for a minute and then a little more as it was ending. Harry, but only where he could hide his face in the deep black of Louis’ suit and only with a perfect silence Liam wouldn’t have thought possible.

Horan’s parents hadn’t cried because Horan’s parents hadn’t shown up, deadbeat father who couldn’t be arsed to make the trip from Ireland and mother dead for over a decade.

Winston cried, though Liam couldn’t decide what for. He’s fairly sure the tears shed that day weren’t for the man being buried, the monster who spun a disguise from toothy smiles and light.

Perhaps they were for the victims. The lives ruined and lost, the scars shared by eleven families and entire communities. Invisible carnage to match the physical.

The tears were for disillusion as well, Liam suspects. Not for those on the outside, maybe, but on the face of each officer, each colleague, Liam saw echoes of his own mangled shock, his jarring sense of reality crumbling away to reveal something far worse beneath. A day for mourning the sense of safety they were meant to hold with each other. Burying their trust.

So it was a show of solidarity for them to be seen like that, Liam and his team, silent as the sixth of their half dozen was lain to whatever counts for rest among the damned.

Just politics, watching Niall fall beneath dirt. That’s all.

Winston said some words that were exceptionally diplomatic and nearly pretty for the benefit of the news crews stationed nearby, but other than that it was as unadorned as an Irish Catholic’s funeral could ever hope to be.

Ashes to ashes, Liam thinks, and spits into the sink.

A shower long enough to wash away days worth of self-neglect. The water scalds and it feels nice, if anything can be considered nice right now. He remembers the cold that saturated him, marrow-deep, after he brought a bloodied and unconscious Zayn out of that flat. Tries to banish the feeling with steam.

They’d both been taken to hospital, Zayn and he, but not in a way that would let them stay together. Liam doesn’t know what was said when his colleagues sat him down and questioned him, can’t entirely recall. Can’t bother to guess what his ringing, empty mind produced for the somber-eyed women who asked him about how the day had come to be. How he knew what he knew.

He can’t imagine he was very helpful to himself, mouth still numb with everything that’d happened.

Nearly a full week out, it’s all still ongoing. The investigation into Zayn Malik’s possible murder of Detective Inspector Horan. The inquiry into Liam Payne’s alleged obstruction of justice in Scotland Yard’s serial murder investigation.

They’re calling it a leave of absence. Liam’s suspension. Propping it up until it’s something noble instead of a disgrace. Until it’s not about the distrustful glances of his colleagues, huddled against the rain at a graveside.

Dressing in something comfortable—he’s not sure how long he’ll have to sit, where he’s going—Liam gives Loki a last perfunctory scratch of the head before sliding out the door, key jangling in his palm. The reporters are still there, still flocking, and he pushes through a bit easier now that he’s already turned them down twice today. Their persistence is always at its peak as the day begins. Hope springs eternal.

A column of scribbles adorn the visitor’s sheet. Liam lengthens it another few centimeters, smiling thinly at the woman behind the counter before striding down the hall to the extended care unit and the familiar door with its drawn curtain.

He’s asleep when Liam steps into the room, lips a soft, unconscious moue. The bruises are yellowing, now, almost green where his skin is palest, and it strikes Liam that he never truly appreciated the difference between bruises one asks for and ones they simply receive.

_You only know me because of my propensity for danger_. It filters through his memory in a quiet voice from what might be a lifetime ago. The detective—former detective, perhaps, whatever becomes of him—presses chapped lips to the boy’s forehead in greeting and takes a seat beside the hospital bed.

Zayn is only asleep, a minimum of tubes and wires connecting him to ominous machinery. Liam remembers hovering over the bedside the second he was allowed, the second he could trust his legs to support him. Remembers listening to the nurse explain that what was most needed was time. Time for the scrapes and bruises to heal, for the small fractures of his ribs to knit. Time for the various medications that had agonizingly drained from Zayn’s system over the course of his abduction to work their way back through his bloodstream, mute the shadows in his eyes. 

Liam has seen them. When Zayn’s not passed out or deceptively sober-minded, small smiles and short conversation with the attendants, he’s something slightly terrifying. Twice he’s been restrained; once right before Liam came in, body convulsing with the unkind reentrance of antipsychotics at too high a dosage, once halfway through his visit when he was overcome by the desire to claw at his nurse until she bled.

The word _monster_ has been batted around. It doesn’t seem fitting the way it might have a week ago. The way it did. Liam traces careful fingers down the sinew of Zayn’s wrist, navigating carefully around the IV filtering painkillers into his system. Gently, he lifts the boy’s hand and presses it to his lips.

“Always such a pouty sleeper.”

Too weighed down in gray to properly jolt, Liam only hunches slightly forward in surprise. He lowers Zayn’s limp hand before turning to the door.

Trisha stands there with her arm tucked into the crook of a man’s, and Liam recognizes the bridge of his nose, the set of his eyes. He’s darker and burlier than his son, but unmistakable for who he is.

Though the way he squeezes Trisha’s hand is perhaps a larger giveaway.

Liam replies to the woman’s quiet words by standing and laying a hand lightly to her shoulder in greeting while extending the other hand to the man. “You must be Yaser.”

They clasp, warm and firm, the man nodding. “And you’re—Liam?” He squints, a look so familiar to Liam that it makes him feel briefly achy. “Glad we finally caught you.”

Calling Zayn’s family had been a priority that sat heavy and heated as a brand from the moment Liam was treated for shock to the second he was let out of questioning. The guilt clogged his throat while he listened to the call ring through, his role in Zayn’s ordeal an impossible weight.

Alerting the relatives—it’s never anyone’s favorite.

Niall used to take care of it.

The sounds of an ignition turning over were present before Liam could even wrap up the call, Trisha and Yaser bound for London with their non-hospitalized children under the supervision of Zayn’s older sister. Trisha passed this tidbit along through text, as well as their expected arrival time and a request that the Inspector please tell her son when he was conscious.

It brought to mind a slew of questions regarding what Trisha suspected the pair’s involvement was; Liam benched them for later. When he told a groggy Zayn that his parents were on the way, he’d been met with blank eyes stained to pitch.

“Wonderful to finally meet you,” Liam tells Zayn’s father.

“Detective Inspector Payne is—a friend of Zayn’s,” Trisha finishes, trajectory changing when she sees Liam’s emerging wince.

Yaser gives the man a look like he knows that’s not all there is to it. There’s no mention of it as he lowers himself into one of the chairs on the opposite side of the bed from where Liam was sitting. He leans forward to squeeze Zayn’s bicep. Trisha settles into the chair beside him.

“Pouty sleeper,” Yaser muses quietly. As an aside to his wife, “That’s a good way to put it.”

“Have you been here long?” Trisha asks Liam, hand coming to massage over her husband’s on their son’s arm.

He has to think about it even as he shakes his head. “Only a few minutes,” Liam decides. Time passes strangely in this little room. It’s a place where Zayn is bound until a psychiatrist can sign off on the drugs flooding his brain, certify he’s level and not likely to dig into anyone else’s bullet wounds, should the opportunity present itself.

The boy doesn’t help his case by spewing absolute vitriol whenever the doctor shows himself. Liam can’t say he blames him; there’s a stack of books and school obligations piled on the tiny desk in the corner that serve as Zayn’s only distraction when he’s awake and not so loopy from morphine for his injuries that he can’t function. He’s going mad with boredom, cooped up in this bleak little room.

Perhaps Yaser agrees. He casts appraising eyes around the space and wrinkles his nose expressively. “How long before they let him leave?”

“Oh, once their doctors give the go-ahead. They’re meant to come by tonight for check-in.” Trisha talks before Liam can get his sluggish, hazy brain to reply, tired eyes unable to lift from where they’ve locked on the slow rise and fall of Zayn’s chest.

Up, down, skin and bone and vital organ. _Alive, alive, alive,_ Liam keeps reminding himself.

It’s what he has.

There’s a moment where he thinks he might have to make stilted conversation with these people who don’t fully know extent of his involvement with their son. Might not appreciate it, all told. Particularly when it’s landed Zayn here.

It’s saved by the small sound of knuckles on the room’s metal doorframe. Trisha and Yaser’s gazes follow Liam’s own to the person hovering in the doorway, uncertain as a specter.

“Lou.” It punches out of Liam’s lungs without provocation, a surprised gasp of sound.

“Hey, Li,” comes the reply. Louis keeps his voice small, body folded into itself where his arms wrap around his waist.

“What’re you—” Liam has to stop himself. Clear his throat. “What’re you doing here?”

Louis opens his mouth, lips pink against his stubble. He pauses when he takes in the other two people present. “You must be Zayn’s parents.”

The Maliks look to Liam, askance, and briefly there’s a flash through the man’s mind of another life where they know him as something other than the overbearing detective whose name keeps appearing on the visitor’s sheet.

He pushes the thought aside, does the polite and proper thing. A quick introduction has Louis shaking both of their hands, expression darting to Liam throughout.

When Liam raises his eyebrow, a silent question, Louis finally murmurs, “May I speak with you alone for a moment, detective?”

Rising to his feet with joints like rusted iron, Liam offers Zayn’s parents a nod of his head and trundles behind Louis to the hall.

In the same second that the door clicks quietly closed, Louis is speaking. “Are you doing alright?”

A strangled chuckle works its way out from Liam’s throat. “No. Not at all.” He takes in the pallor of Louis’ skin, the bags under his eyes. “You?”

“’Bout the same.” Louis sounds parched, like he hasn’t ingested water or anything else of value in the last few days. Liam can relate. “I wanted to give you something.”

Liam shakes his head. “You don’t have to apolo—”

“No,” Louis cuts off, easy and familiar enough to draw a subtle twinge, “that’s not what I’m doing.” Quieter, “Arse.”

He reaches into his pocket and draws something out, small and obscured by the fingers he wraps around it. When they unfurl, it still takes a moment for Liam to process it.

“How do you have this,” he asks. His hand moves without consent of his mind, plucking the narrow flash drive from Louis’ palm.

“Thought you might want to hold onto that.” Louis shifts on his feet, randomly cagey.

Randomly, or. “Lou. Answer the question.”

Louis waits until after an attendant races by with a chart held to their chest and disappears around the corner. “You know you’re my best mate, yeah?”

Something crucial lurches in Liam’s chest, lungs or heart or both. “Dunno if I deserve that. After everything.”

“I’m not saying you deserve it,” Louis says, direct and like he means it, “I’m saying it’s the truth.” There’s tension in Louis’ eyes to add, “And I’m saying nothing on that drive ever made it to evidence.” A sniff, maybe a bit self-satisfied. “Conveniently.”

It’s a shock, something relieving and redeeming, something Liam can cling to like he’s clinging to the small piece of technology in his hand. “I was shit to you, though,” he says, numb.

A shrug. “You thought I was accusing your boy of serial murder, bit understandable you’d be upset. Bygones, and that.”

Liam bites his lip, shakes his head. It’s something to hash through, all the ways he’s wronged the man in front of him. It’s not the most important thing right now. “You’re my best mate, too. For what that’s worth.”

Louis takes in a deep breath, eyes clearing. “I’m glad, to be honest. Makes this worth it.”

He doesn’t pull out a folder or a medal or a pill that will make Liam’s life okay, and so the detective is forced to ask, “Makes what worth it?”

The pathologist licks at the seam of his lips. Liam sees the hint of his tongue as the man’s eyes find his, resolute. “You’re gonna get a call sometime today. Or tomorrow. Dunno if they want Winston anywhere near it, actually. They might want to find someone else first.”

None of that made sense. “What’re you—”

“Let me _finish,_ ” Louis insists. There’s a hint of a smile backlighting his irises, ghost of a grin at the corners of his mouth. “You’re gonna get a call, and they’re going to tell you you’ve been reinstated to your position in the CID.”

The words take a moment to process, Liam only staring. And another. Finally, Louis lets out a small huff of annoyance and kicks at Liam’s shoe with his own. “You planning on reacting anytime this year?”

“Why?” Liam asks, because it’s all he can think. He realizes how high his eyebrows have climbed, how rounded his lips have become as the shock of it wears off and the questions mount. “Why am I—why is that happening? What did you _do?_ ”

Louis has his hands on opposite elbows. He barely lifts one to scratch higher up on his bicep, hip cocked where he stands off to the side of the hall.

It’s nonchalance, but Liam’s life is—a lot of things right now, pain and confusion and grief, but it’s also what it’s always been, and he can still tell when the pathologist is affecting an appearance.

Confirmation of this fact comes in the form of Louis’ throat bobbing, his eyes casting down before he speaks. “I need you to not worry about what I did or did not do. Just be ready for that call. Alright?” With this, he looks up and meets Liam’s gaze.

Something clicks for the detective as he takes in the flinty blue. “You suspected Niall, didn’t you?”

The name rasps against the soft tissue of Liam’s throat. He doesn’t feel the rawness of it until it’s already out in the air.

Judging by the way Louis winces, it must filter through his ears just as unpleasantly. They were all of them close, before. “I did.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“I tried,” Louis cuts in. “I tried to tell you, but I couldn’t figure out how. Not without him catching on to what was happening. And you thought I meant—you thought it was _Zayn,_ and.”

Less breathable than water, Liam feels suffocated by the words. He imagines all of Louis’ incredible caution while he built a case against Niall, wary cataloging of every lie and errant action. Unable to voice what he suspected for fear of the delicate situation spinning out, chaotic.

Liam knows the feeling. It’s beginning to process how much of the decay between Zayn and he was a product of his own suspicions, his unvocalized accusations.

His fault, in essence.

It doesn’t all rest on his shoulders, he reminds himself. No matter how heavy they feel when he presses them to the cold wall of the hallway. He breathes out to make sure he still can.

The question is building in the slant of Louis’ mouth long before it ever makes it off his lips. “How’re you two handling everything?”

“Not,” Liam answers. He can tell it’s too quick. “We’re not, uh. Not handling anything.” He motions with a hand toward the closed door. “At a bit of an impasse, I think.”

It’s the truth. The condemnation runs both ways, now, a treacherous undercurrent when their eyes meet in that sterile little room. Liam had thought the boy guilty of unspeakable acts. Zayn had lied to the detective with every part of himself. On and on, the two of them went. For _months._

All that really means now is that whatever trust was built between the pair is a distant memory, ashed out like a cigarette on damp concrete. Almost sad in its certainty.

Even if none of this feels certain. Liam keeps visiting, he and Zayn keep staring at each other as if galaxies and not inches separate them, and he keeps getting ushered out the door at the end of visiting hours having solved nothing. Some days he’s welcomed in by someone who almost resembles the boy he knew—stripped of pretense, he’s bitterly realized, since the game is up—and they have conversations that are almost normal, except for how Zayn responds half as often and with a quarter of his usual wit. Other days Zayn is unconscious or wishes he was, in pain and jittering through the reentrance of harshly-dosed chemicals to his system, reaching for the hand that Liam never fails to offer up. Squeezing it hard enough to make the bones creak.

None of it offers resolution, this hospital holding pattern, and while Caroline has assured Liam he’ll have better luck once Zayn’s fully on-boarded his medication, he’s not convinced luck’s what he needs.

An explanation, maybe. A few session with Caroline for himself, perhaps. Luck is what gave him enough to go on to solve this case and find Niall’s location, find Zayn giving in to some darker instinct, fingers caked in blood. Luck is what shattered the world.

He’s not much for it.

“He matters to you,” Louis muses, watching the flat bleakness of Liam’s expression. “He definitely still matters to you, doesn’t he?”

“I’m in love with him,” Liam replies, zero hesitation. It’s just another thing he’s had to think about the last week. Another thing he’s come to accept. Niall is dead and a killer. Zayn is alive and a sociopath.

And Liam loves him. Every shadowed piece.

The realization’s been sitting somewhere under his breastbone for a while, heady and intoxicating or else cold and punishing, glaringly obvious when he stopped to think about it. And so he never stopped, not when he was building a case against the boy, not when he was hiding the pieces. Not when he thought he’d lost him.

Only now that he actually might. 

The only tell of Louis’ surprise is the twitch of his brow. “Is that enough?”

Is it ever? Liam drops the thumb drive into his pocket. “Tell me you didn’t risk your job to get me reinstated.”

“I didn’t risk my job to get you reinstated,” Louis repeats dutifully.

Opening his mouth, Liam only lets out a defeated puff of air. “Come over and play Fifa sometime this week. Please.”

“I’ll bring beer.” Louis starts stepping backward down the hall. Liam finds himself resisting the urge to wrap a hand around his wrist, keep the rare shining fact of Louis Tomlinson in his line of sight. But then Louis says, “Go back to your boy,” and he knows it’s a brightness he’ll have to seek out later.

He’s wanted in the dark.

The filled-in clang of the door shutting makes Zayn twitch on his bed, his parents looking up as Liam steps back into the room.

The mouthed _sorry_ meant to keep Zayn from waking proves unnecessary when he opens his eyes like he’s been waiting, uncanny with their quick focus after days of drowsy dilation.

Mostly turned toward his parents, it’s no surprise when the first words out of Zayn’s mouth are “Alright, Mum?” Liam’s heart clenches nevertheless.

It’s weird, watching someone without a capacity for emotion interact with the people they should feel the most for. Zayn is polite bordering cordial as he accepts his mum’s hug and the kiss on the forehead from Yaser. The ragged edge to his voice while he tells them of his current state reminds Liam that he’d had a wickedly dry throat all of yesterday—a side effect of the pills, he’d said—and the man scurries forward to fill a fresh, waxy cup from the sink built into the far wall.

“The pain is better,” Zayn is saying obediently, “but I still want to tell you to leave me alone, mostly.”

Liam sets the cup down on the bedside counter and watches, fascinated, as Trisha and Yaser only nod like this is an acceptable reply. Zayn’s glance doesn’t so much as flicker to him.

Yaser’s does, though, and he smiles up at Liam where he’s trying to make himself inconspicuous against the wall.

It’s enough to have Zayn following his father’s gaze, eyes landing on Liam with the weight of an inevitability. “Wanna talk to Liam alone. If that’s okay.”

The phrase is clunky, rarely finds its way out of Zayn’s mouth. All the same, Liam imagines everyone appreciates the effort. Trisha runs a hand through her son’s unkempt hair before standing and leading Yaser out to the hallway. They cast Liam and Zayn a knowing look that makes the detective’s ears burn before shutting the door behind them.

Silently, Liam hands Zayn the water. Watches his outstretched hand quaver as he accepts it.

A sip. The clock above the bed produces audible ticks.

Then, “If I had told you myself, what would you have done?”

Liam breathes out through his nose, eyes falling shut for a moment. Straight to it, then.

Zayn is propped up on his pillows,  more lucid than Liam’s seen him in the past day. No hint of the shudders that wracked him while medication flooded into him, coated his veins. No sign of the sleepiness or outright hostility that marked so many of his first interactions after waking up from sedation. He’s _here_ now, present in a way he hasn’t been in the last week, and Liam knows this has to happen.

The conversation is overdue. It’s still not welcome.

“Liam,” Zayn prompts in the face of his stillness. “What would you have done.”

A good question. Under other circumstances, in another life, if Zayn had sat across the table at dinner and told Liam he was unable on a neurological level to _feel,_ what would Liam have done?

“I’d have asked why you bothered,” Liam decides. The overhead light has been left off in the room so that only the glow of the lamp and the wan light behind the blinds is left to illuminate them.

“Bothered.” He looks like he might know what Liam means, placid hands on top of papery sheets, eyes calm on the detective’s, but he doesn’t say anything else. Just waits to be given an explanation.

So Liam gives him what he wants. In that way, he’s never been able to help himself. “To get to know me. To—sleep with me, stay for dinner. Stay the night.”

Pressure to continue comes in the form of Zayn’s unflinchingly blank expression, so he adds, “You got the file— _months_ ago, god. I couldn’t have kept you off the case if I tried. _When_ I tried.” He licks over his lip, pain a dull sear just below his collar bones. “You put way more work into getting the info you wanted than you had to.”

There are dark crescents under Zayn’s eyes, medicated whiteout rest leaving him visibly unrested. They’re no match for the shadows in his irises, nearly black in the minimal lighting. “I wanted to be close to you.”

Irritation, prickly and familiar, flares down Liam’s spine. His gut twists with how little he wants—any of this, the knowledge of Zayn’s betrayal, the weight of his own. “I’m telling you it wasn’t _necessary_.”

He has to looks away, then, from the coal-hot burn of Zayn’s expression, the utter emptiness of it. There’s no point wishing for the facsimiles of compassion and interest and concern, the false animations that marked what they had before. Those weren’t real. That Zayn doesn’t exist.

“Does it…scare you.” It’s scratchy and low, barely inflected well enough to call a question. “That I lack empathy.”

Liam swallows, still not looking at the boy on the bed. “It bothers me how you use it.”

“I can’t help what I am,” Zayn says, so level that it can’t be anything he hasn’t said before, “I can’t help it anymore than you can help _feeling_ everything.” Resolute and whisper-quiet like an incantation might be, “I’m not going to apologize for who I am, Liam.”

“So don’t.” Liam surprises himself, a bit, with the harsh timbre of his voice, the glittering-mean look he finally throws Zayn. “Don’t apologize for a disorder. That’s not something you asked for, I get that. Apologize for _lying._ Apologize for making me think there was something—” No point, there’s no point in pursuing that line of thought. “Apologize for me finding you covered in Niall’s blood, if you’re so inclined.”

“He tried to kill me. He tied me up and beat me and tried to stage a _suicide,_ I’m not going to apologize for _shit._ ”

Liam lets out a frustrated little huff. Everything is complete disarray inside his skull. “That’s—fair,” he admits.

“What’ll you be apologizing for, then?” Zayn says, embers stoked in his voice now. Perversely, relief thrums in Liam’s veins at the return of color to the boy’s tone. “Believing I’d murdered eleven people? Building a case against me? Since we’re talking deception.”

Liam’s silence is very, very loud. Then, “I knew you were hiding something and it all—it was _made_ to look like it was you.” His eyes defocus, lost to a momentary recollection of those awful, sleepless nights, the mistrust settled into his chest like heartburn. “I went where the evidence lead me and I got played. I’m. I _am_ sorry for that.”

“Okay, well. I’m not sorry for what I may or may not have done to Niall’s body when I was losing my _goddamn mind_.”

He’s being provoked, he’s pretty sure. “But you get what that looks like?” Liam demands anyway, hand thrown out in entreaty even as he wants to twitch from the image Zayn assaults him with. “If they haul you into court for what happened to him, I have to testify that I saw you picking apart a fatal gunshot wound.”

“You think I killed him?” Zayn asks, incredulity low and sickly green under the rasp of his voice. “Think I’d do that?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Liam spits.

It’s cruel and he knows it. Sees it in the way Zayn’s mouth settles, goes to neutral like he doesn’t want to spend the energy on pantomiming hurt for someone he doesn’t much care for. “I don’t know how the gun went off. I couldn’t even see straight.”

They’ve gone off topic, verged into territory left murky by both of their flawed memories. Liam pinches the bridge of his nose and continues. “I don’t care what you did to Niall,” he admits, and it’s a bit treacherous to voice aloud but damned if he doesn’t mean it. “I don’t care what you are,” he continues. “Don’t care if you’re—antisocial, psychotic, OC-fucking-D, I don’t give a fuck about it and it doesn’t bother me. What _bothers_ me is that you lied to me for the majority of a year.”

“If I’d told you about—”

“Not the lie I mean, Zayn,” Liam bites out in a tone he always seems to fall back to in their arguments, now and before and however much longer they share each other’s air.  “The lie about _us. That’s_ what I’m having an issue with.”

Liam has never seen Zayn look truly miserable. It’s not something the boy has a capacity for, heart like a cinder, but if it was, he imagines its pale shadow might look something like the expression that graces his face now. A delicate pinch to his eyebrows, dry lips slightly parted for words that fail to materialize. Finally, “Liam, if you need me to tell you that I can’t love you, then I’ll tell you.”

Something in Liam screams at that, pained howls whose only physical manifestation is the stutter in his breathing. It’s nothing new, he reminds himself. He knows this is how it is. “Thank you for that.”

The words aren’t strong. They don’t ring with triumph or clarity of purpose, and Liam is so fucking sick of grieving. He really is.

“I’m gonna,” he mutters, motioning toward the door with his head. He shuffles around the bed, feels Zayn’s eyes on him the whole time. If the boy breathes his name in something dangerously close to supplication, it’s nothing to worry about.

Liam manages a small smile for Zayn’s parents where they sit outside the room, moving quickly past them like he has somewhere to be. His eyes are stinging by the time he’s back to the visitor’s entrance, blurry enough that he doesn’t see Louis until the man is saying his name.

“Liam. Hey,” he coaxes, hand on his arm. “Mate, are you—?”

“Why’re you still here?” Liam asks, voice strangled as he nudges under each eye until they’re both clear.

Louis comes into better focus then, concern on every inch of his face, in the tightness of his grip.  “Had a. Feeling, I guess.” He shrugs. “Glad I did.”

A watery laugh. “Me too.” When Louis has leveraged Liam into a hug, made easy by the fact that there are few places more suited to the spectacle, he rubs circles meant to soothe into the detective’s back.

Liam takes the moment to calm his breathing, and then Louis is speaking. “Wanna go pretend none of this is happening?”

Before Liam can tell him that he’d like that very much, there’s the vibration of a call coming through on his mobile. He disengages from Louis’ steadying embrace well enough to pick the phone out of his pocket and take in the display. His brow crinkles as he turns to show Louis the screen.

The pathologist’s eyes widen slightly, but he flips some fallen strands of hair out of his face and shrugs permissively. Liam nods, silent agreement, and taps the green button.

“Hello?” he greets.

“Liam,” comes Styles’ voice, “hey.”

“Hey,” Liam draws out, eyes flicking to Louis like he might be able to explain the medical examiner’s behavior. Louis just shakes his head, nonplussed.

“Are you feeling—do you think you’d be able to come in today?” There’s a hesitance to Harry’s tone that Liam decides he doesn’t like, used to the easy, confident drawl.

“To the morgue?” Liam bites at the inside of his lip. “I’m with Louis right now, we could head over in a second if you’re free.”

“Yeah, yes,” Harry says, something like relief in the exhale of his words, “bring Lou if he’s around and come in whenever. Oh, can you ask him if he’s seen my jacket?”

Liam nods to himself, pulling the mobile back from his ear as he goes to repeat the question. Before he can, Louis murmurs, “Tell him it was in the car and I’ll bring it to him.”

The detective relays the info, telling Styles they’ll see him in a bit. He and Louis walk out the hospital doors together.

Liam finds it easier to analyze the peculiar peace on Louis’ face in the weak light of the sun.

“He’s it for you,” he observes. “Styles.”

Louis drops his head forward. “This week well proves it, I figure.”

The soft tissue of Liam’s chest pulls gently apart when he takes in the simple happiness resting on the edges of Louis’ expression, run otherwise ragged by events beyond their control. “I’m glad,” he says, willing the light there to fill the spaces inside him left hopelessly shaded.

The pathologist strides through the doors of the morgue and greets Styles with a kiss, pressing the wool coat into his chest as he does. They murmur something to each other Liam tries not to pay attention to, instead pacing over to the long workbench where he and Harry had sat mere days ago and worked through one of the last pieces of their macabre puzzle.

Harry greets him with a sheepish nod, hand light on Louis’ waist like it doesn’t quite know how to pull away. “Thanks for coming by.”

Liam flattens his mouth. “Not a problem.”

There’s a flurry of Styles’ lab coat whooshing around him as he strides to a line of filing cabinets built into the wall, pulling one open. A small white label reads _Open Cases F-J._ Liam feels his gut tighten as he sidles up to Louis and watches Harry walk long fingers over the tabs of various files until he finds what he’s looking for. 

“I know I could’ve just e-mailed you the report when I filed it later tonight,” the examiner tells Liam, “but I thought you might want to hear it in person.”

It’s vague enough to make Liam twitch, a sharp contrast to the ease of Louis’ posture that suggests he might know what’s coming. “Don’t bat it around, then,” the detective grits through a jaw that feels wired shut from nerves.

“Getting to it,” Harry says, eyes narrowly focused and very green as he looks at Liam over the top of the file he holds. He lays it on the table, flipping open the manila folder to reveal evenly scrawled forms and a stack of glossy photographs. These he extracts, spacing them out evenly on the stainless steel table.

When Liam darts a glance to take in Louis’ expression, he sees the man with his eyes narrowed slightly and his tongue moving behind his pursed lips, analyzing the visceral images with a medical mind.

Liam doesn’t have that advantage, only a detective’s sensibilities, only memories thick and overpowering. He works to separate the cold, sterile reality of now from the muzzy recollection of a moment that haunts his sleep. Tries to see the photos of a wound in pale flesh—clean but no less brutal—with a clinical eye.

Tries not to remember how it had come to be.

“When we analyze bullet wounds,” Harry says, measured, “we use impact to figure in the angle. The weapon, too, if we’re. Y’know. Lucky enough to have that information.”

Louis makes a little noise of encouragement while Liam only stares at the ragged tears in the entry wound, marks where incisive fingers worked their way under. It’s still a shockwave through him every time he remembers: _Zayn_ did that. Reached inside and—

“The, uh, the tampering with the entry wound was a bit of an obstacle,” Harry admits quietly, wary of Liam’s reaction. The detective only shifts his weight from one foot to another, stuck staring at the hateful line of images implicating someone he still feels in his blood. “But. After running a few tests on ballistics gel—cool stuff—it’s. It’s pretty clear that Zayn would have had a hell of a time hitting him at close range from that angle. Of getting off an intentional shot meant to kill.”

Liam’s ears prick, muscles near the back of his skull feeling hot when he looks up too quickly to take in where Harry is indicating the photographs like this pivotal information is something plain as day.

“This, paired with the number of defensive wounds on Zayn’s body after the incident and the, uh, lack of evidence supporting his finger ever actually touching the trigger—” Styles shrugs, expression fidgety but clear. “He didn’t kill him. It’s—in the testimony he said he didn’t know how the gun went off, and given how hard the withdrawal from…everything…would have been hitting him by then, that’s—” the man scratches at the back of his head and shrugs an inch, mouth flattening to a wide line while his eyes flutter shut, “—that’s looking to be the truth of it.” A little less detached, “He didn’t kill him, Li.”

It’s a testament to how much therapy Liam is likely to be paying for in the future that the news brings no relief. “He still exacerbated the wound,” he says, distantly aware he’s directly quoting Winston and none too proud of himself for it. “He still defiled a—a corpse.”

Louis looks like he might want to say something, mouth wide open as he prepares one of his speed-run lectures. Harry beats him to it. “You know what he was on, right? His medications.”

The detective’s throat works as he swallows back the rant that plays on loop in his head. How unfair it is that Zayn’s been made to disclose the ins and outs of his disorder, the treatment and therapy and everything else he worked so hard to keep under wraps. A contradiction to his own sorrow that Zayn felt the need to hide it from him, maybe, but strong and called to mind easily by Harry’s simple question.

“The whole Yard knows,” is what he bitterly offers.

“So you know that he had a paroxetine prescription,” Harry continues. “Paxil.”

Liam nods an affirmative, vision unfocusing until the wound in Niall’s chest looks more like a black hole. “Used for OCD, they said.”

“Compulsions, yeah,” Harry agrees. “Liam, he wasn’t in his right mind when he did what he did. N—Niall, uh, didn’t let him take his pills. He wasn’t given much of a choice in what his mind told him to do.”

No one mentions Harry’s voice stumbling over the deceased detective’s name, but Liam sees Louis’ hand come up to rub at the crease of the man’s arm through layers of fabric.

Liam lets his gaze fall from the tender motion, loneliness flooding him like bile. “I’m not the jury. It’s not me that has to be convinced of his innocence, here.”

“Liam,” Louis says softly, gentle rebuke in it.

“There won’t be a jury,” Harry dismisses. “There’s no case. Didn’t Lou tell you he—”

“Harold,” Louis yips sharply.

Harry’s mouth works uselessly for a moment before he changes tack. “Look. Just. I thought you might want to know, okay? Thought you might want to hear that your boyfriend’s innocent. Neuroatypical in a big fucking way, which I can only imagine is a pain in the arse for him, but he’s not intentionally violent.” He shrugs. “He never was.”

Liam shoots Louis a look, surprised and a little relieved as his hand drifts to his pocket where the thumb drive rests. The miniscule nod Louis offers is confirmation enough. One secret safe, then, the shadows of Zayn’s past remaining firmly sealed off from the problems of the present.

“He’s not my—we never actually labeled it,” Liam offers through numb lips. “He’s not. It was more of a game for him, I think. Considering.”

Considering. The pair beside him nod, but there’s a mirrored set to both their mouths that has Liam irritably asking, “What?”

“I mean,” Louis begins, careful with his words in a way he seldom is, “’s not like he had to put in that much effort, you know? Do what he did. Had the whole team charmed, didn’t he. Could’ve made it easy on himself.”

Liam scratches at his nose. “He likes a challenge.”

“He likes _you,_ ” Louis blurts.

Liam meets his eye to read the baffling certainty there. It doesn’t belong, paired with such an absurd statement. “He doesn’t like anyone.”

“No, I mean,” Louis lets out a small frustrated noise, hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck while he struggles to make it make sense. “He can’t—sociopathy. It’s a lack of empathy, yeah? Lack of…connection. To humanity. Lack of remorse.”

“Can we move on,” Liam says tightly.

“But that doesn’t account for the—the _effort_ put in,” Louis tries. “I dunno if you realize this, Li, but he didn’t _have_ to sleep with you. Or stay at your place. Or bring you _food_ when you _worked late._ ”

“Yeah, those’re…strictly optional activities,” Harry offers. When Louis shoots him an appreciative little grin, he smiles back, easy and sweet.

Liam watches them for a moment, wondering if the words out of their mouths will ever fully register or if they’ll dissipate on the surface of his cold, too-thick skin.

“I guess I’m failing to see why that matters,” he finally says. “I don’t know what that has to do with him lying to me for months and months and months.”

“He’s not getting it,” Louis says in an undertone. “Okay. You know what? We can come back to this later. Hazza needs to file a report and we need to go get pissed.”

“Meet you in a bit,” Styles says, dropping a kiss to the pathologist’s temple without taking his eyes off where Liam is still struggling to make today’s words and revelations matter.

Zayn is innocent in at least one way. It’s something to be grateful for, he supposes.

It doesn’t do much to plaster up the wounds Liam feels acutely inside himself, but that might come with time. If this is the type of thing people recover from.

The detective isn’t naïve. He’s tasted lust and lived through heartbreak, watched his world tear apart and pull back together, stitch by aching stitch. There’s light at the end of all tunnels, sometimes bleaker and dimmer than what one recalls, but nevertheless there. It’s a project, reaching it, half conscious effort and half the passage of days putting in a thankless effort.

He’d never really hoped to stay in the dark, before.

The morning finds him on a couch that isn’t his, scratchy blanket draped over him with a post-it on his forehead informing him that Louis nicked his key and went to grab Loki so the dog doesn’t shit on the carpet of Liam’s flat. There’s a little scribble on the corner that Liam’s dried-out brain takes far too long to realize is supposed to be a dog. The man leverages himself off the sofa so that he can locate water and perhaps an unused toothbrush, mouth tasting predictably foul.

There aren’t any new toothbrushes, and Liam can’t make up his mind about which of the two in the cup by the bathroom sink is Louis’ to chance using it, so he calls it good at using a blue-green rinse he finds in the cabinet. The lighting is enviably good in Louis’ bathroom. It’s still not enough to erase the ragged pain in Liam’s eyes, unmistakable at a glance.

“You look like shit,” he tells himself.

The last time Liam had woken up hungover like this, there’d been a boy in a pair of his boxers making a fry-up in the kitchen and prattling on about how to combat a buildup of toxins.

He looks at the bloodshot brown of his eyes and considers that. Such a massive effort, always, just to—what? What was Zayn’s goal, all that time? He had the file before they so much as kissed. He was grudgingly offered a seat at that long office table so shortly after that it was nearly a sure thing. He didn’t—he didn’t _need_ to—

It’s not the type of hope Liam can afford anymore. Not with a friend—colleague— _friend_ guilty of murder and kidnapping and buried in the earth. Not with so much ruin around him.

There will never be a time when he and Zayn can be like Styles and Tomlinson, gentle touch and perfect sweetness in the face of the world’s darkness; their darkness isn’t an external thing. It’s a beast that lives inside them both, through chemical design or circumstance of occupation or simple choice. It’s a shadow they curl into like a second home, together or apart. It’s something both of them crave, primeval and dangerous as a knife’s unprotected edge, a match’s unfettered spark.

What kind of life could possibly be built from that?

He’s still standing over the sink in the loo when the front door opens, a skitter of claws on the linoleum forcing a smile to Liam’s lips.

“Tommo and Adventure Pup return triumphant!” comes a slightly breathless voice. Distracted, “Christ, you’re big now. Why did your dad keep feeding you?”

Liam shuffles out into the entryway to rub Loki’s ears, card a hand through the fur of his back. There’s almost no evidence he was ever found bleeding on the floor of Liam’s flat, damaged nearly beyond repair by a maniac and kept alive only by the grace of a sociopath. The dog snuffles a bit, more or less over the incident, even if Liam might never be.

_Not like he had to put in that much effort, you know? Do what he did._

He buries the thought in the scruff of Loki’s neck before drawing back and padding to the couch. Loki has a moment where he looks between the two humans and the sofa, unsure if this is a dog-friendly space or not, before Louis flops down onto the opposite end and pats at the space between he and Liam in encouragement. After they’re all settled in and Louis is navigating to the Netflix app, he shoots Liam a sideways look the detective catches out of his peripheral.

“How’re you feeling?” Louis asks.

“Like I wish nobody would never ask me that ever again,” Liam answers truthfully. “Yourself?”

“I meant your head, you absolute drama queen.” Louis picks one of those dry American comedies he favors and stands again, padding into the kitchen as he adds, “You drank like you were trying to win something last night.”

“Only your hand,” Liam rejoins, tone saccharine. “It’s fine though, thanks for. Asking.”

“You gonna go see Zayn today?” the man asks.

“Why would I go see Zayn today,” Liam calls back, eyes on the telly.

“Because you see him every day.” Louis sticks his head out of the kitchen with an egg in one hand. “I had to sign the visitor’s sheet, too.”

Liam is distracted from answering by the way Loki’s ears have perked up, head coming up from the couch to whip around at the utterance of the familiar name.

A fruitless search. Liam’s heart pangs when the pup looks to him with his head quizzically cocked, one ear turned down in confusion and something like sadness.

“You miss him, baby?” Liam murmurs, hand scratching the back of Loki’s neck. “Miss your boy?”

A little noise of doggie distress—it startles Liam, sometimes, how emotive animals are—and he settles his head on Liam’s thigh, eyes cast upward plaintively.

Liam’s throat tightens. He feels an urge to justify, explain why things are the way they are to a creature that can’t entirely appreciate the gesture, but then Louis is swearing loudly and quite fluently and telling him it’s going to be a few more minutes on the eggs, and the excuses leave him.

He goes to see Zayn. Of course he does. Anything else seems unthinkable.

There’s not much of a thought to vanity, circumstances what they are, but Liam goes to the effort of at least making sure he’s not fully disheveled. Chances are that Zayn will be able to see the signs of his hangover regardless. Liam wonders if he’ll know that he’s the cause, however indirectly.

Same people behind the counter when he checks in. Same visitor’s sheet, nearly covered in scrawl as they move toward the end of Zayn’s stay. Same heavy feeling just before he opens the door and steps into the shaded room.

Zayn is at the desk, focused on something in a notebook. He’s sitting up straighter and stiffer in the chair than he tends to favor, wary of the wrappings around his torso, the re-knitting of his ribs. Liam’s eyes tighten in sympathy.

“Gonna stand there all day or are you going to come finish what you started...” Zayn says, gaze unwavering on his notes as his voice trails off momentarily, “…like an adult.” He finishes something on his page, pen sliding carelessly from his grip.

“They’ve cleared you of suspicion,” is Liam’s opener. He doesn’t plan on admitting that it’s mostly because he knows it’ll shock Zayn into paying attention. The boy’s gaze flickers up, undertones of green prominent in the light that filters through the small window. “I’m six years older than you, also. I’m, like. Almost always an adult.”

“That’s rather nice of them to figure out that what I told them was the truth,” Zayn says mildly, taking in Liam in his doorway. “Who’d you go out with last night?”

“I owe you an apology.” Liam walks further into the room, letting the door click behind him and coming to hover in Zayn’s space. “I was being shitty yesterday. And. For a while, before that.” He hiccoughs and scratches at his wrist, eyes evasive while Zayn stares. “Sorry doesn’t really cover it.”

There’s unpleasant silence for a moment, Liam all too aware he’s offering himself up on the dais of Zayn’s dubious mercy, Zayn just as aware and with no reason to be merciful.

Then, “I don’t like how repentant looks on you,” Zayn says quietly, thoughtfully, “y’know? Thought I might, but I don’t.”

When Liam brings his eyes up, Zayn is staring at him like it’s a month ago and they’re moments away from whispering into each other’s mouths. There’s nothing cruel to it, nothing withdrawn. Something maybe slightly cautious in the draw of his brow, which Liam figures he more than deserves, but the boy looks for all the world like _Liam’s_ boy, mercurial and calculating and sharp in the best way. Familiar angles.

“It’s what I’ve got,” Liam offers in the face of it. “I’m—I’ve dragged you through enough, at this point, but I was hoping to tell you something before you make a choice either way as to what. Um. What to do about it.”

Zayn turns to face Liam more fully, mouth tightening with the slight strain on his torso. Liam feels his fingers twitch with the useless urge to alleviate the ache.               

Which tells him about all he needs to know, really.

“What’ve you got,” Zayn prompts quietly.

There’s a tremor to the words, something Liam can register but not process over the throb of blood in his ears as he takes that final step into a chasm with no definite bottom. “I’m a bit fucked up,” he says. Which, not quite what he meant, but not untrue, and anyway, it might need to be said just as badly as the other bit. “I’m not—sometimes I wonder if all my pieces are put together correctly, right, but they sort of. They _fit_ with you. They always. Always have. And you—” he motions to the boy in the chair, eyes widened just slightly as Liam spills chunks of his eviscerated heart all over the tile, “—you’re someone I think might claim to be a bit fucked up, but that’s not what I see in you, and—the thing is, Zayn—”

“Li,” Zayn says softly, barely exhaled off the pillow of his lips. 

“Let me finish,” Liam begs. “Please.”

The boy has to bite on his lip to manage it, but he nods.

“I’m in love with you,” Liam says.  It feels garbled in his ears, rings through his veins with swimmy echoes, but it must _sound_ okay because Zayn is nodding like he thought to expect this. He’s opening his mouth again, though, and that’s no good, so Liam rushes on. “I—look, there’s a lot of ways that I haven’t treated you half as well as you’ve treated me. But. You’re someone I want to figure out how to be good to.” He swallows, throat too dry, hands too jittery. “That’s what I’ve come out of this situation knowing with—with _perfect_ clarity. The only thing.”

Another moment of stillness where Zayn only stares, so intent the hairs at the back of Liam’s neck prickle.

“I killed a dog once,” Zayn says. “Did you know that? As a kid. It bit my baby sister and scared her and I killed it.” His breath is quiet and even. “And I still don’t regret it.”

“I did know that,” Liam replies, honesty coming easier with every syllable. “But I also know you kept Loki from dying.” Quieter, “He misses you, y’know.”

“Sometimes I make you hurt before I can stop myself,” Zayn volleys back. “I talk some shit or forget to think about possible outcomes and then you suffer for it. You _know_ that.”

“Where the hell did you get the impression I can’t handle it?” Liam demands. “Sometimes—Christ, Zayn, sometimes pain is _useful,_ okay? You should know that better than most.”

The words extricate themselves from Zayn’s being like they’re a physical agony to say. “You don’t want to be with someone who can’t feel for you, Liam,” he says, and there’s a desperate edge there that cuts Liam to the bone. “Look, I’m being straight-up with you here, I can’t—it’s a show, it’s always just a show. That’s all it can ever be, do you understand that?”

It hits Liam, then, the enormity of what that means. How much of a conscious effort each jubilant smile and sweetly wicked word is, how much energy it must all take. A constant denial of one’s instincts, a continuous trickle of synthetic chemistry in one’s blood to at all ease the struggle. Checking and double-checking one’s behavior, trying always to blend into a society that makes no fucking sense from a perspective freed of emotion and its intricacies.

And yet.

“Then why bother at all?” Liam insists. He crouches, below Zayn’s eye level where he sits in his chair, and reaches for his hands. There’s vindication when the boy doesn’t pull away, just lets Liam hold onto some part of him. “All that time, you did _so much_ that—hell, Zayn, there are people with a full emotional range who don’t love as hard as you.” He searches the boy’s eyes to see if it’s connecting, if the words he’s filling the air with are making any difference.

“I did it because I wanted to,” Zayn says, frantic and dismissive and a little wild-eyed like that isn’t exactly what Liam wants to hear. “It wasn’t—that’s not _love,_ Liam, that’s just me doing what I want, it’s not the same thing.”

“I’m asking you to tell me how it’s different,” Liam says, resolute. “Dunno if you know this, but you’ve acted like someone who was in love. Is that—” And here, at the crux of the issue, Liam nearly falters. “Is that something you still want?”

“To play pretend?” Zayn spits, eyes bright with something Liam has felt in himself too many times to fear or doubt. “What happens if I don’t want to anymore, Li, did you think about that at all?”

This answer is easier, less nebulous. Liam is a planner. “Okay, so, you tell me if it stops being something you want.” At Zayn’s dubious expression, “All I ask is that you _tell me_ stuff—about your ASPD, about your life—and then we work through it together.”

_He has you,_ Caroline had said. That has to mean something, that the woman responsible for Zayn’s moral compass thinks Liam is staking an ever-increasing claim on the boy’s flawed heart.

He’s betting on it.

“What if I lie?” Zayn demands. “What if I fuck around on you and lie about it? What if I—”

“You won’t,” Liam says, letting the rumble of his voice crush the flutter of uncertainty in his abdomen. “You won’t, because it’s a betrayal of what we have, and you work way too hard to do what’s right to allow something as mundane as cheating to throw you off.”

The boy’s mouth is a hard line, brilliant mind working behind his eyes to identify the cracks in Liam’s resolve.

He won’t find any. There’s not a way Liam can imagine himself being dissuaded from this, the only thing he knows he wants. Some wayward piece of him disguised as a stranger in an alleyway.

“I’m gonna hurt you, Liam,” Zayn says. “I’m going to keep hurting you. I can’t—help that.”

Liam laughs, low and dry. “Babe, anyone could hurt me. It’s like—it’s finding someone worth hurting for.”

Zayn’s own laugh is a little strangled, a little incredulous. “That’s fucked. That’s a really brilliantly screwed-up way to look at relationships.” 

The bickering is doing what most of their bickering does to Liam, leaves him with an elevated pulse and a smile tugging at his mouth. Gets him a bit turned on. Softly, “I just mean that the good outweighs the bad, with you. _In_ you.”

It’s a little tender, the brief quiet that settles over Zayn as he considers that.

Finally, “Are you willing to take the risk that you’re wrong about me?” Zayn asks, and it’s measured enough that Liam knows it’s the last real question that remains. “That I’m—different than how you thought. That you might not like what you see.”

He already has his answer. “I think I can safely say that I’m willing to do a lot of frankly terrifying shit for you,” Liam answers, just as grave. “I’m willing to risk a hell of a lot more than my heart.”

A last, tense moment of stillness before Zayn’s mouth quirks hesitantly up. “That what you’re offering?”

Liam turns Zayn’s hand over until the palm faces down. Lifts it to his mouth. Presses his lips to the sinew of his tendons. “You want it?”

A tiny shrug. “Take it or leave it,” Zayn murmurs a moment later against Liam’s smile.

 

Loki is the first through the door when the lock clicks over, newly lanky frame skidding across the wood and into the wall before he can stop himself.

“Bring it down a notch, fluff,” Zayn calls to him, already tumbling his rucksack onto the sofa. He reaches for Liam’s hand a moment later, locks their fingers together and hauls Liam over to the door of the art room.

“Is this you excited?” Liam asks, watching the way light catches in Zayn’s eyes, swirls there as he opens the door.

“I’m interested to see your reaction,” the boy corrects.

“I’m going to love it.” Liam follows him into the little room, sunlight milky through the window. “I love all your stuff, you know that.”

“Don’t be boring,” Zayn chastises, lifting the sheet that covers his easel. “Tell me what you actually think.” A pause. “Please.”

“Alright.” Liam takes a step back, lets his eyes focus on the piece as a whole.

Oh.

Fractured, nearly prismatic in its construction and color, the painting is a cross-section. It is, Liam realizes, a depiction of the flesh and muscle and blood and bone that make up a person, each layer stratified to allow for detail. Laid out like a depiction of earth’s crust.

“So the—obviously the top layers are gonna be the skin,” Zayn says to fill the stunned silence, “epidermis and dermis and then hypodermis, right, and that one includes fat and connective tissue, blood vessels.”

The detective’s eyes trace over the layers as they’re described, the browns and pinks and yellows one vibrant shade off from reality. His mouth is still uncooperative, lulled in by the spell of Zayn’s words as he always is.

“Then you get into the muscle, so you have that top layer of it, the deep fascia, then skeletal muscle, perimysium, epimysium…I didn’t bother with the fascicle and that, because. I just didn’t. But.”

Pinks with undertones of blue, such elegant depictions. Astounding detail juxtaposed with abstracted lines.

“Tendon and then bone,” Zayn continues, a bit of a rush to it, “so y’have the periosteum, then the compact and cancellous bone tissue. The marrow.”

Liam can see that, hard exterior and spongy internal tissue made somehow ethereal with Zayn’s careful strokes, his light wash of color.

But there’s something else.

“What—” Liam clears his throat, tries again. “What’s that, though,” he says, voice thin.

Below the skin, down past the muscle and tendons and marrow, there’s a layer that Liam can’t identify. Silky midnight blue, uninterrupted and running along the entire bottom of the painting.

Deeper than bone.

Zayn doesn’t answer. The silence finally registers, Liam’s stunned gaze sliding from the canvas to the boy beside him.

Who is, as it happens, already looking at him. Liam feels fingers brush his own, twine them together silently.

He still doesn’t explain. Liam thinks he might understand.

 

From this position, the late spring sunlight hits Liam dead in the eye as it sets. He shifts on the floor, slumps a bit back. Zayn will have an easier time fucking around with his hair at this angle anyway.

Not like he’s done much else since Liam got it buzzed.

“Obsessed,” Liam mutters, a thousandth repetition.

Zayn is up on the sofa and so his legs are in the perfect position to squeeze at Liam’s sides, make him squeak out a lost breath. Liam can feel the boy’s snort through the thighs his head rests between.

“Okay, it’s done, I think,” Harry calls from the kitchen. “It…it looks done.”

Louis hisses out a _god yes_ and springs up from the opposite end of the couch. Liam goes to trip him as he passes, unsurprised when his reward is Louis kicking him in the shin and flipping him off without turning around.

They trail the man into the little alcove that serves as the dining area in Louis’ flat, shuffling around until each of them can squeeze into the chairs nearly pressed into the walls.

Harry floats over with the serving dish, squinting like he’s still not sure of it.

“We’re doctors, Harry,” Louis says, already reaching for the serving fork. “No one’s gonna die from your chicken.”

“Salmonella only takes about a week to clear up anyway,” Zayn reassures the man, shifting his chair slightly to better tangle his leg with Liam’s.

Harry smiles broadly. “Thanks, Zed.”

“Zayn is also a doctor,” Louis points out. “Nearly.”

“Yeah, hey,” says Liam, spooning couscous onto his plate, “how’d the meeting with your advisor go? Get everything sorted?”

The boy’s expression, a pleasant neutral, freezes over. “Sure, Li,” he says, tone dangerously saccharine. “So how was therapy?”

It gets very quiet, then. Liam feels the wash of shock and then the blood flooding his face. His gaze darts to watch Harry and Louis, forks frozen, eyes wide.

“I hadn’t actually told the lads about that,” he forces out, mechanical.

“Oops,” says Zayn around a mouthful of chicken, completely unbothered.

Fucking hell. “Can I talk to you in the hall for a minute,” Liam says. Louis and Harry look like they have no idea how to react, surprise and trepidation coloring in the space left by their stillness.

The boy’s shoulders slump in irritation, chair grating hard against the floor when he pushes back. Liam follows him out of the bright little kitchen, throwing a quiet _we’ll be right back_ over his shoulder.

When they’re in the hall outside Louis’ door, Liam figures he best just get to the point. “Why did you say that?” he asks. “You knew I hadn’t told anyone that I was—was talking to someone, yet.”

Zayn examines him with dark eyes, mouth in a bit of a twist. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, “I don’t see why you’re all freaked out over them knowing.”

“Because I wasn’t ready to tell them,” Liam says, voice straining. “It’s sensitive info, Zayn, it’s not—not something I’m sure I wanna talk about yet. With anyone, pretty much.”

“It’s not sensitive enough to merit lecturing me in the hall,” Zayn says, dismissive.

Liam puts his elbow to the wall, rubs at his brow. “That’s not yours to decide.”

Zayn is affecting detachment, but it’s only that. “I don’t understand why you’re upset,” he says, a touch quieter than the rest. “Sorry, I don’t.”

Ah. “It’s like— _you_ know, because you’re my boyfriend. You know because I trust you. Yeah? But when you share private stuff with other people—even our mates, even Louis and Harry—it leads me to question whether I can trust you with other things going on in my life.”

With a scoff, Zayn says, “You trust me. You totally trust me.”

“I want to,” Liam tells him. “I want to be able to trust you with everything.” While Zayn mulls that over, Liam tacks on, “When you betray trust, even in those, like, small ways—you give the impression that you don’t care about whether I’m comfortable or happy or okay.”

“ _Liam,_ ” Zayn snaps, tone sharp. Like the thought scalds something internal for him.

“That’s how it feels,” Liam insists. “It—it hurts, Zayn.”

At that the boy’s expression drops, lashes casting shadows down his cheeks in the warm lighting. He fiddles with the sleeve of his shirt. “You have to promise not to hate me for what I’m about to say,” he says, gaze averted.

“I could never hate you,” Liam tells him easily. He means it.

Zayn’s expression quirks. “I know,” he admits. He looks up, then, and says, “When you mentioned, uh, when you asked me about school stuff it didn’t—it didn’t sit right with me. It was—bad? It was bad. So I wanted to make you feel that way, and then I—did.”

Liam nods. Holds a hand out. Zayn takes it without hesitation, and Liam rubs his thumb over the back of it as he asks, “I’m sorry for making you feel bad.” Then, “ _Why_ did it make you feel bad?”

A garbled, frustrated noise. “Lila, she—uh, apparently I had to take an incomplete for one of my courses while in hospital. I know,” he adds when he sees Liam’s expression. “I know, it’s utter rubbish, but. She wouldn’t give me the form to appeal it, so it’s like—I need her to sign off on it, and. If I can’t appeal it, I won’t be able to graduate next spring like I’d thought, and—”

“Oh, oh oh,” Liam coos in a hushed undertone, hauling Zayn’s body into his. The boy twitches once as Liam’s arms come around him then goes lax in his hold, breathing into the hollow of his throat.

“I hate her,” Zayn whispers. “I really, fully hate her.”

“Me too,” Liam whispers back. He sways their bodies gently for a moment, keeping Zayn pressed against him. “Sweetheart, she’s gotta give you the appeal.”

“She won’t,” Zayn repeats. “She absolutely will not.”

“She will if a Met officer shows up and starts asking a lot of questions about her educational and advisory practices,” Liam says. “’S a publicly-funded institution, they’re—y’know. Beholden.”

“Mm.”

“Did you keep a record of correspondence?”

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles into his collarbone, “was all e-mail.”

“I’ll get a warrant,” Liam tells him, “she’ll break.”

He can feel Zayn’s lips twitch up. “Seems you’re falling to corruption, Detective Inspector.”

For Zayn? Always. Liam finds himself wildly unbothered.

As they step back into Louis’ entryway and make their way toward the kitchen, Zayn murmurs, “Sorry for lashing out. Or whatever.”

“You’re forgiven.” Liam tells him, smiling when he sees Louis and Harry’s expressions melt to relief as they turn the corner. “Or whatever.”

 

It’s the kind of tension that calls for broken glass. Something jarring and violent.

Liam wonders which of them will do the breaking and which will step on the pieces.

“Heading out,” Zayn says, muted. His keeps his hands and eyes busy collecting his things, works to not look at Liam.

Liam watches him. “Out where?”

The boy pauses, then. He looks up, frank annoyance in the narrowing of his features. “A friend’s.”

“You don’t have any friends,” Liam says before he can stop himself.

How quickly tables turn. Zayn gets to watch Liam’s face as his brain catches up with his mouth and his eyes widen in horror.

Zayn nods once. “Fuck you,” he calmly states, and it catches Liam just how much older Zayn looks, how much he’s grown in the year since they met.

He doesn’t even slam the door. It still seems to rattle.

Dammit. “Zayn,” Liam calls weakly. He sighs, tips his head into his hands. In a chastising undertone, “Stupid stupid stupid, Payne. So fucking stupid.”

He doesn’t come back to Liam’s that night, just shoots him a text that seems particularly grudging.

_Safe, fed, warm. Talk to you tomorrow._

_Thank you,_ Liam replies. A few minutes later, _I love you a lot._

He’s asleep by the time the reply buzzes through.

_You’re my world, you utter prick._

 

So excruciatingly green, here.

“We don’t have to.”

Trees and hedges and the grass itself. Verdant to the point of pain.

“Payno.”

Liam doesn’t remember it being this green.

“Mate, if you’re not—”

“I’m ready,” Liam says, voice clear in the car.

“Are you sure?”

He shakes his head, but says, “It’s been six months, I’m not—if I’m not ready now I don’t know when I will be.”

Zayn sighs from the passenger side, throws Louis a look in the rearview. “You know that’s not how that works.”

“Let’s just do it.” Liam unbuckles, swings his door open. “We’re already here.”

The three shuffle across the immaculate lawn, past tasteful stones and gaudy angels, plots strewn with cheap baubles and wilted flowers.

None of them are much up for talking.

They reach it after what is either seconds or thirty-thousand years, Liam decides, but reach it they do.

_Niall James Horan,_ the small, dark stone reads, followed by the dates.

No inscription. No one could think of anything that seemed suitable.

They still don’t really know what to say.

Feeling desperately naïve, Liam thinks about how he’s never really been close to someone who’s died before. He’s never had to grieve in that way. Grieve for real.

Because he has, now. Mourned the friend he thought he had. The lives taken long before their time—memories that leave him nauseous with guilt. He’s mourned for the distrust and internal damage left in the wake of the last year, nightmares of blistering white card stock still haunting his sleep.

He doesn’t think those will ever really leave him.

“Could I,” he starts. Tries again. “Could I have a minute with—alone.”

“’Course, mate. Yeah.” Louis throws an arm over Zayn’s shoulder, guides them both away and off toward a bitingly green copse of trees.

Liam opens his mouth. Pauses.

The breeze shifts and ruffles his hair. There’s a bird singing that very much sounds like it would be blue.

“Ni,” he starts quietly, coarsely. “I don’t—don’t really know what I’m doing here. Um.”

Niall doesn’t have anything to say to that, unsurprisingly. Liam buffs out a smudge of dirt near the stone’s base with his shoe.

“You used to tell me that the killer—the they were sick. Used to tell me that a lot, actually.” Liam bites at his lip, wants it to stop trembling. “And I’m—god, you’re not forgiven for what you did, you’ll _never—_ but I’m still.”

The bird stops its chirping for a breath and into that moment Liam spills out, “I’m so sorry, Niall.”

The detective isn’t sure he believes in the soul, isn’t sold on divinity as more than a much-needed construct. Something to cling to.

He’s clinging now. “I’m sorry that life didn’t offer you peace. I’m sorry your father was evil and your mum was gone and I’m so sorry, Ni, for not seeing what was going on before it was too late for you. For everyone you took with you.”

Another shifting breeze. “And I. I hope it’s easier, wherever you are.” He swallows. “And if it’s not, if it can’t be, then. I hope you’re not anywhere at all.”

Nothing epic or quippy or grand comes to mind for him to add, nothing that would firmly bookend the experience, and that figures. Closure is still keeping its distance.

It’s the closest to absolution he’ll ever be able to give, he thinks.

As they’re climbing back into the car, he sees the bird. It’s on the cemetery gate, a solitary fleck perched upon the wrought iron.

And it’s blue.

 

Trisha has this very consuming embrace. Supremely mothering. Liam once mentioned this on a drive back down from Bradford, eyes darting occasionally to the dozy man in the passenger seat.

“I used to fucking hate when she hugged me,” Zayn had muttered more or less into his knee, leg propped against the car door. “She did it all the time, just out of nowhere. Surprise attack hugs.”

Liam frowned a bit as he shifted gears, navigating around a slow-moving truck. “And what about now?”

“Hm?”

“When your mum hugs you,” he clarified. “D’you hate it?”

Zayn was quiet long enough that Liam’s smile couldn’t help but curl, voice drawing out the vowel when he coaxed, “Zayn.”

“No,” Zayn had snapped as Liam’s laughter poured into the space.

It’s a happy memory. It fits well into Liam’s psyche today, called forth by the smell of Trisha’s perfume and her little asides about each grad as they strode on stage, little comments that had Liam shaking with suppressed laughter and elbowing the woman playfully.

He receives similarly tactile greetings from Zayn’s sisters, clustering around them as they wait for Yaser to finish retrieving his son from the crowd milling about near the stage set up on the green—it’s all rather posh, rich fabrics, big banners, trumpets and a string orchestra.

Liam could see the extraordinarily unimpressed expression Zayn wore as he crossed the stage from his seat. Maybe it says something, how it only made his grin widen.

While they wait, he introduces Styles and Tomlinson to the girls and makes a note to tease Waliyha later about the moony expression she wears as Louis charms them all with some animated story.

A hand comes to wrap around his elbow, narrow fingers squeezing once before tracing a major artery down to the hand he has stuffed in his pocket. Liam entwines their fingers without thought, pressing a kiss to Zayn’s mouth in greeting before turning back to the family gathered around them.

Trisha pulls her son into her and coos a _congratulations, sunshine_ that makes Zayn’s mouth twist into some kind of affectionate grimace that has Harry laughing before echoing the sentiment with everyone else. A warm little spark burns in Liam’s chest when it’s his eyes that Zayn seeks out after his mum lets him go, easy weight.

“ _Congrats,_ ” he mouths, giving a wink that must not be as successful as he hopes based on the way Zayn huffs out a laugh of his own.

They navigate in a cluster to a space on the green that’s more or less clear of other families. Liam notes that Zayn appears to be under the impression he’s facing an executioner, dread in each drag of his feet.

“’S just pictures,” Liam murmurs, finger swiping over the gold on Zayn’s wrist. “Cameras can’t actually steal your soul.”

“Such a waste of time,” Zayn mutters back, but he smiles wide and dazzling as he poses with his family and friends and Liam.

After they agree where to meet the Maliks for dinner, they make their way back toward the car, Zayn offering a chirpy _I hate everyone here_ to a classmate who calls and waves.

It takes a minute to find the vehicle amidst the swarms of people. By the time they locate it, Zayn has wrestled most of the way out of his gown. Liam holds the cap loosely between his fingers.

“I think the idea is to suffocate you before you get to the stage,” he mutters through the synthetic fibers, “separate the ones who really want it from the slackers.”

“Lot of slackers in the doctoral programs?” Liam questions, gripping Zayn’s elbow to guide him around a group of young women who still chatting.

“There’re always slackers,” Zayn says, head of static-frizzed hair emerging from the bottom of his gown. “Anywhere you go. Queen Mary had Owen Clark, Scotland Yard had Ben Winston—”

“We try not to speak ill of the sacked, Zed, it’s bad taste,” Liam says, opening the passenger door before striding around to the other side. Zayn slides in, still gathering his gown into a manageable ball of fabric that he wastes no time in throwing into the back seat. “That was a million years ago, also,” Liam adds after a moment of thought. “I think our Winston banter’s just verging on pathetic, now.”

“Fair enough,” Zayn’s eyes are fixed on the pull-down mirror as he messes with his hair. The length of it shows platinum in the spring sunlight, roots still a raven black. Liam fancies that he sees a fleck of red in it from the paint Zayn worked with all morning. “You be in charge of good taste,” the boy continues, “and I’ll be the one people like.”

Liam’s hand slackens on the key where it’s slotted into the ignition. “I love you,” he says helplessly.

The clever fingers Zayn has pulling at his hair pause as his face tucks upward into a small smile. A real one. “Get us out of this parking lot, Jaan. Please. I never want to see this place again.”

Humming out a sigh, Liam replies. “Wish command etcetera, Doctor Malik.” Then, “God, that’s hot.”

“You gonna be okay?”

“Yes.”

“We gonna make it home?”

“Shut up, yes.”

“Just checking.”

“You’re a nightmare.”

 

When the painting falls and the frame splits with an ear-rending _crack,_ the puppy is so startled that he piddles on the rug.

“Watson, don’t—dammit,” Liam says, pointlessly outstretched hand falling to his side.

Zayn watches impassively, gaze flicking back up to Liam’s from across the room as the dog finishes up.

The detective holds the stare, motions to the fallen artwork weakly. He’s got his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, hair in disarray. Sweat is building on the back of his neck. “How is it,” he wonders, “that I solve murders for a living and you’ve all your degrees and between the pair of us we can’t figure out how to hang a painting?”

“That sounds like a physics question,” Zayn says, lofty, “and physics is stupid.”

“Bet we could get Karlie to do it,” Liam says, but he’s already sort of giving up.

It’s been a long day already, dragging furniture to and fro, assembling bookcases and lamps they’d bickered over endlessly before deciding on.

They’re tired. A little sore. The puppy’s taken a wee on the new rug.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” Liam says honestly.

“We needed the space,” Zayn agrees, but Liam sees the way he swallows. Sees what he’s really saying.

“Let’s—get some takeaway, yeah?” The detective fumbles for his mobile, collapses onto the sofa that sits askew in what will eventually be the living room.

Zayn snorts. “What, don’t fancy breaking in the kitchen?”

“It’s a fucking disaster in there, I can’t even look at it,” Liam mutters darkly. “Greek or Thai?”

They eat on the floor of the art room, press their feet together. Watson nearly trips on his oversized paws in an attempt to wrestle food from them while Loki watches from the corner, brow quirked like he knows better.

Rather disgustingly domestic, altogether.

“Oh,” Zayn says, sudden like it’s just occurred to him, “that practice down the way, they agreed to give me the space.” Around a bite, “If I hadn’t. Y’know. Mentioned.”

Liam nearly chokes. “That’s great,” he gasps out, pounding at his chest. “That’s—I’m really proud of you, babe.”

“We’ll see if it goes anywhere.” He’s working hard to look unaffected, Liam’s boy, but the detective has always been able to read him best, late nights and cold mornings and half asleep and righteously angry.

So he says, “It’s an excellent idea. Caroline’s already agreed to make referrals, so. Don’t stress it.”

“I don’t stress,” Zayn replies immediately.

Sardonic, Liam only says “Okay.”

He tries to tidy up while Zayn showers. Cleans the mark Watson left on the rug—reassures him they still love him when he sees his mournful gaze—and gets all the empty packaging they’ve accumulated throughout the day into the bin. Stares at the sofa like he might move it somewhere that makes sense.

He still hasn’t managed it when Zayn comes back out, hair messy and damp, smooth planes of skin interrupted by nothing but a dark pair of pants.

“Your. I was just—” Liam bites at his tongue, words garbling as he takes Zayn in. Lithe, perfect angles. Grown in the subtlest of ways since they met, face more defined, movements more settled.

Sweeter and sharper.

“Get on the couch,” Zayn tells him.

Always so direct. Liam’s cock twitches. “I’m all sweaty still.”

“I don’t care.” Zayn starts walking toward him, eyes like dark fire. “Now get on the couch.”

So Liam does, leans back into the cushions as Zayn comes around to straddle him, lean legs gripping at his sides.

“Dunno why you’d whine about sweat,” Zayn murmurs, lips on his ear. “You’d think I’d never lectured you on pheromone signatures before.”

He feels fantastic, warm supple weight in Liam’s lap, small movements of his hips getting the detective worked up with each press to his groin. Liam can feel the muscles bunching and working under Zayn’s skin as he shifts, feels the heat start to pool in his capillaries. Touches their lips together, more a caress than a kiss.

“Lecture me again,” Liam requests.

A breath of laughter. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.” There’s a hand on Liam’s shoulder, squeezing at the muscle of his bicep before continuing down to his forearm, his wrist. “When we talk about sweat, what we’re usually talking about is pheromones. It’s not a perfect science yet, still fairly new—” Zayn raises Liam’s pliant arm to his nose, breathes in at the pulse point before tracing his lips there, nipping with his teeth. Liam is already dizzy with it. “—but it’s been shown that the neural circuits of your anterior hypothalamus—related to sexual preference, they think—respond to how someone smells.”

“Even if they smell like they’ve been hauling boxes up three flights all day?” Liam murmurs, vision edging toward hazy, thumbs rubbing circles into the jut of Zayn’s hipbones.

“Especially then,” Zayn tells him. “Especially when they’re fucking gorgeous, all broad and strong and lovely, fuck.”

Liam feels himself flush with the words, heat melting down his spine as his hips twitch of their own accord. “So the anterior hypothalamus.”

“Yeah,” Zayn hums, tucking Liam’s hand against his chest so the man can pinch at his nipples, scratch lightly down his pecs. “So the pheromone, they call it AND, and they find it in the sweat of males.”

“Hot.”

“Shh.” Fucking around with the buttons of Liam’s shirt, Zayn continues, “You end up registering the smell in your orbitofrontal cortex, as well.” He starts actually undoing the buttons, now, little sounds as each one comes undone. “’S responsible for olfactory function. Obviously.”

“Obviously.” The detective lets his fingers dip below the waistband of Zayn’s pants, rub at the juncture of his thigh while completely avoiding the hard line of his dick.

Which is probably why Zayn’s voice is a little less even, a little less calm when he says, “And it’s—it also causes a reaction in the fusiform gyrus. You. You use that to recognize faces.”

Liam decides he rather likes this, the look of Zayn falling apart just from a well-placed touch. He rolls a nipple between his fingers, lets his pinky brush the base of Zayn’s cock. Feels Zayn’s hands stutter against his abs as he does, breath an uneven flicker between them.

“So when it’s, uh, when you smell someone you’re—with—Liam, _god,_ ” Zayn croaks.

“Go on,” Liam encourages, whisper quiet with his fingers wrapped around Zayn’s length, stroking slow enough to be a little unfair.

“You get—it makes you want them.” Zayn breathes hard, pretty mouth dropped open to haul in oxygen as his hips press down harder in Liam’s lap. “Makes you want them so bad, Li.”

Fuck. Liam needs to not be wearing trousers. He fumbles for the button with his free hand, unsurprised when Zayn pushes it away to deal with it himself.

“But that’s, they think that has more to do with pair bonding,” Zayn continues, strain in his voice even as Liam pauses the movement of the hand on his cock, helps him get the rough fabric of Liam’s trousers down to his knees.

“What’s pair bonding, then,” Liam slurs out, enjoying this, the wetness he can see where the head of his cock pushes at the cotton.

“It’s—” Zayn shifts, then, starts wiggling out of his own pants, confident that Liam will put a hand to his side so he can shift without fear of falling. “It’s how monogamy happens at all, it’s very—” He readjusts himself in Liam’s lap now, fully naked with a hand divining into the man’s lap. “Important, like that.”

“It sounds important,” Liam says, slightly mocking for the way it makes Zayn squeeze his length a little harder, twist his hand a little meaner.

“It _is_ important,” Zayn confirms. “Your prefrontal—prefrontal cortex and your—takes these off, Li, Christ.”

“Yeah,” Liam mumbles into a kiss, hot and slow. “Yeah. Go on.”

He wiggles his pants down, hisses out a breath when Zayn squeezes idly at the head of his cock. “And your nucleus accumbens and your, your ventral pallidum, they’re all critical for pair bonding,” Zayn continues.

“That’s very sexy that you know that,” Liam informs him, lips on his neck, teeth nibbling at the skin as it develops a sheen of sweat. He inhales. Thinks he gets it.

“Fuck, haven’t even got to the good part yet,” Zayn tells him.

With a groan, Liam pushes at the small of Zayn’s back until he can wrap a hand around both of them. Zayn’s fingers tangle with his a second later, both stroking. Tight heat.

In the instant his eyes fall closed—worried the mere sight of Zayn like this will make him come before he’s ready, if he’s honest—he feels Zayn’s forehead press against his, warm, jagged breath between them.

“They’re all,” Zayn pants out, “all involved in your meso—your mesolimbic dopamine reward system.”

“Yeah?” Liam manages, and it comes out as a bit of a whine as he moves their hands together faster.

“Yeah, it’s—um,” Zayn stumbles, voice breaking. “It’s—you get conditioned to your partner’s scent, their—”

“Their sweat—” Liam supplies.

“—and the, the feeling.” He can feel Zayn’s skin burning, imagines how flushed his chest must be, how bright his fevered eyes. “Which explains why I’ve—god, I’ve had so many people, Li, so many, but you’re—it’s like I’m _addicted,_ I can’t—”

There’s a noise that’s mostly Zayn’s name tumbling from Liam’s lips as he comes, electric shocks of release melting into a heady blankness. He knows Zayn’s mouth is dropped open as he rides out his own orgasm a second later, hips stuttering through it like he can’t help himself.

Like it’s just that good.

“’S fucking ridiculous, how much I always want you,” Zayn spills out into Liam’s mouth, kisses dragging between them as they come back to themselves. “’S like you’re in every cell of my body.”

Nerves and organs and bones. Blood, especially. Always that.

Liam feels him everywhere.

 

The diagram is rather gruesome. Liam isn’t entirely sure why they chose to scribble it all out in red.

“You’re not hearing me,” says Styles. He’s got a hand tangled in his hair, bun thoroughly askew. “The organ systems are independent, right, which means the action _itself_ could have been _—_ ”

“If there’s only one outcome and it’s failure of both systems, then the action was obviously suicidal in intent,” Zayn argues. “What, did she think she’d just walk around with a corpse attached to her the rest of her life? That wouldn’t _work._ ”

“Why are we doing this right before dinner,” Liam wonders.

Thoroughly ignoring him, Harry says, “There are procedures for conjoined adults that weren’t even a thing twenty years ago, she might’ve thought—”

“But that’s still supposing it wouldn’t be labeled a homicide,” Zayn returns.

Harry stares at the diagram, rough lines on paper that rests on the cool metal worktable. He scratches at a bare hint of stubble, stark in the light of the morgue. “I’m not gonna lie, this is a little above my pay grade.”

Zayn nods, reluctant agreement. “We’ll come back to it. Liam, did you say something about dinner?”

They break off on their own after a meal that Louis joins them for, shoulders bumping as they make their way down the street.

It’s warm, baked summer heat in the pavement even as the day dies. The shadows that cumulate in the dusk paint Zayn in violet, hits of orange as they pass under streetlights.

“Because if you kill someone who’s literally attached to you, you’ll die,” Zayn continues idly as they turn the corner to get to the car, “that’s barely even science, that’s just—what are you doing.”

“Come here for a second,” Liam urges lowly, steering Zayn with an arm around his waist into a side alley.

“You’re gonna nick my wallet, aren’t you,” Zayn wonders, tripping over his own clunky boots as he follows Liam into the poorly lit space. They stop under the single yellow light, Zayn’s back to the wall while Liam stands in front of him. “My god, it’s an ambush.” His eyes glow with the light above them as he asks, “This is the end, isn’t it?”

Liam takes a breath, head down and finger hooking around the metal warmed by body heat in his trouser pocket. Thin and silver and all he’s been able to think about for the last three hours, Christ.

“Something like that,” he agrees, and looks up to meet Zayn’s eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.


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